What The Effect
by thebluninja
Summary: A hostile AI has taken over Citadel Station, and six heroes from other times have been brought here to stop it. None of these heroes know each other, none of them know this world or its technology, and their only hope to return to their own times and worlds is to stop a megalomaniac machine that already has control over a space station the size of a city.
1. Neville Longbottom

Taking a deep breath, Harry braced his legs and pushed. There was a groan, then the pile shifted slightly as the scorched remains of what might have been a bedframe sagged, then fell over with a deafening clang. Turning, he gave a wan smile and a shrug. "Sorry, that was a bit louder than I expected."

Ron snorted, taking a grip on his wand and levitating the mass into the air, leaving the ashes behind on the floor. "I still don't get why you volunteered us to help with this, mate. We could be enjoying a two week break from Auror training, and instead we're helping McGonigal clean up the bloody mess Crabbe left behind.

"Aren't you the slightest bit curious?" Hermione asked, bending over a stack of what might have been books one. "I mean, Fiendfyre isn't used very often, and for good reason, but that means that most wizards don't understand what it can do besides 'burn anything.' "

Harry just smiled to himself, tugging at the melted remains of a set of curtains. With a sudden tinkling noise, they came free, and he found himself looking at, "The mirror of Erised," he murmured out loud. The mirror, able to show one's heart's desire, still stood, though black marks marred the frame and the glass within was warped and heavily cracked. Despite this, the shards of glass were still reflecting something, as Harry could see glimpses of himself, and something blue and white behind him. Glancing over his shoulder to confirm, he waved to the others. "This one's almost still intact!" he called out.

Everyone came over somewhat quickly, and Headmistress McGonigal gently elbowed her way to the front of the small group of volunteers. "Goodness, this is quite a find. I didn't expect there would be anything still intact in here. I'm still surprised that young idiot didn't burn down the entire castle!"

Neville grinned, leaning out from around Hermione. "I wonder if we could fix it? Reparo!" he said, tapping his wand against the mirror. As he watched, the cracks traced back together to three points, vanishing, and the rippled glass slowly smoothed out. Neville looked at his reflection, and behind him in the mirror was the sudden appearance of a dead body.

Gasping in shock, he whirled around, raising his wand defensively. A moment before, he had been standing in the Room of Requirement, along with a good chunk of the former Dumbledore's Army, now current Auror trainees. Now, he was … where the heck was he, anyway? An office of some kind, looking out an open balcony over a half-burned park, two desks with some piece of Muggle technology on them, one chair with a body of a … well, they weren't human, and they had blue-purple blood, that was all he could tell. Electric light strips ran around the perimeter of the ceiling, and a metal sliding door was bent and jammed open about four inches.

Staying low to the ground, Neville moved away from the mirror on the wall over to the balcony, and peeked over. Down below him was a park of some kind, and he was up three stories, maybe four. Bodies were obvious from their absence, though pools and splatters of dark red, blue, and yellow were in abundance. Still, he'd fallen further without harm. The only other option was to try to Apparate, but since he wasn't sure where he was, that probably wasn't the best plan of action. Moving over to one corner of the balcony, he slipped up onto the railing, then silently levitated down to the pathway below.

Only then did he realize that this area wasn't completely flat. He stared off into the distance, where the burning park and pools of scummy water curled gently up. His eyes followed it, all the way up, and he turned around to follow it back down around. Wherever he was, it was some kind of ring-like structure. And through the center of the ring, he could vaguely see stars and bright clouds shining in without the familiar twinkling he was used to.

At random, he started off to his left. A few hundred feet away was the crashed remains of what looked like a wheel-less car. At least, he thought it was a car, but it had been a while since he took Muggle Studies. As he started to step around it, a figure suddenly popped into view. "W-w-welcome to Cit-c-c-citadel St-st-station-n-n-n," it stuttered, even as a _Stupify_ from his wand shot right through the middle of it. "W-we have had no f-f-f-f-fatalities for zero-zero-zero-zero days. For a guide-de of the Presi-si-sidium, simply say 'Tour'."

Neville stared at the glowing, translucent woman for several moments before remembering to breath. Narrowing his eyes, he took a short step closer, examining it in detail. It almost seemed to be three overlapping ghosts – one pink, wearing a sort of body-stocking; one wearing some kind of body armor; and one made up of green lines and circles. "How far am I from Hogwarts?" he asked quietly.

"Loca-ca-tion unknown-n-n-n," it stuttered out. _Curious_, he thought, _seems like it really is three different things, somehow trying to answer at the same time._ He tried several other wizardly locations with the same result, then tried asking for London. "The c-c-city of Lon-n-don is app-p-prox-s-s-imately fifty th-th-thousand light years away," it answered.

Neville simply swallowed. Then frowned, as an even better question occurred to him. "Why are you speaking English? Are there more humans around here?"

True to form, the ghosts (or whatever they were) promptly answered. "Citadel Station c-c-c-urrently houses almost two poin-n-nt five million," and almost in mid word, the face and voice of the green lines took over entirely, "PATHETIC CREATURES OF MEAT AND BONE."

By this point, Neville had noticed the little metal disk directly underneath the floating feet of the figures, and gambling that this device was not in fact magical in origin, pointed his wand at it, saying forcefully, "Hexus!" A sort of heat-wave shimmer engulfed the disk, and with a gout of sparks and plume of smoke, the translucent woman flickered and disappeared. Fairly quickly, he backed up to the wall, looking in both directions down the ring, then continued to the left.

Almost right away, there was a sort of courtyard, with benches and shattered displays and more bloodstains. Stairs led up to somewhere from the back, but to his surprise, there were directions written on the wall in English. "Human, Elcor, and Volus embassies?" he muttered to himself. "What the heck are Elcor and Volus?" Lacking any better directions, he crept to the back of the courtyard, avoiding as much of the glass as possible, and went up the stairs.

The doors here had all been jammed open, wide enough for the patrolling guard to pass through. A sickening display, the humanoid creature had bright blue skin, though what its face looked like, or even what its gender was, he couldn't be sure, as from the waist up, so much of it had been replaced with metal pieces of Muggle machinery as to render it unrecognizable. Still, if there was somewhere likely to give him answers, it would probably be the human embassy. Assuming anyone was still alive, that was.

Waiting behind the doorframe, Neville watched it lumber awkwardly out of a room and turn its back to him, starting up the short flight of stairs. As loud as he dared, Neville aimed his wand and said, "Stupify!" The red bolt struck it squarely, showing no effect other than alerting it to his presence. Turning around, it shrugged off two more Stupify curses, adjusted quickly to a Jelly Legs Jinx, and fired what he belatedly recognized as a gun that now utterly replaced the left forearm of the creature. The bullet shot past, leaving a sharp line of pain across one rib and spilling blood down the inside of his shirt.

"Expelliarmus!" he tried in desperation, as it moved to line up another shot, and with a sickening tearing sound, the gun tore free off the forearm of the cyborg, spraying blood as it flew over Neville's head to clatter down the stairs. Realizing it was now devoid of a weapon, the cyborg raised its other hand, and a blue-black glowing ball of energy quickly grew in the palm of its hand. "Bloody hell," he gulped, casting Protego just as the ball of energy shot towards him. It rebounded off his shield, bouncing back and literally squashing the metal-studded head into goo-covered scrap metal.

Gingerly, he stepped over the body, moving down the corridor until he saw the sign for the human embassy. This door wasn't jammed open, it had been melted through, the slag long since cooled on the floor. He stepped inside cautiously, wand ready as he swept the room. The desk here had the Muggle device turned on, judging from the floating orange display between two wand-like protrusions. Moving around the desk, and keeping his wand pointed towards the door, he glanced down. Audio files, he wondered, and tried poking at the glowing display with his fingers. Sure enough, a speaker in the desk began reciting someone's audio diary.

"Councilor Udina here. Something has gone horribly wrong with the station. By all appearances, someone has smuggled in or programmed an actual AI. To make matters worse, they somehow integrated it into not just the Citadel VI program, but also into the very structure of the station. It's gained control of the Keepers now, and the damn bugs have been swarming around the Presidium. They're dragging people away, though I'm not sure where."

Neville frowned, crouching down and sliding open the desk drawers. He hadn't seen any bugs yet, though he'd only been here about five minutes. Though part of him could imagine that the machine-person he just faced might have been a cause. It sounded like one of those horrible Muggle movies Hermione liked to watch, the one with the guy and the two robots making jokes.

"Though I hate to admit it, I wish Commander Shepard was here, not locked up on Earth awaiting trial. I've barricaded the door as best I can. I don't have her hacking skills, so I can't say if this message is going to be heard by anyone else." The voice cut off with the sounds of weapons being fired somewhere nearby, and for a moment Neville scurried for the nearest wall to put at his back. "C-Sec is doing their best to fight back, but there are more Keepers than we ever imagined. If anyone gets this message, send in all the firepower you have. Destroy the Citadel if you have to, just don't let this AI gain control of anything else!"

The recording stopped with a beep, and he moved back to the drawers. There was another gun here, something smaller, which he reluctantly shoved into his belt. There were also numerous plastic and glass-looking devices here, none of which he could make any sense out of. As he slid the drawers closed, the display beeped at him, and he looked up to see the previous information had vanished to be replaced by a simple set of instructions.

"1. Go to the storeroom behind the mercantile district near the embassy.

"2. Look for a box labeled 'Kassa Fabrication' and put one of them on your wrist.

"3. READ THE MANUAL. Then change your communication channel to Mode 27."

He stared at the display, reading it about five times, then it suddenly turned off. Listening carefully, he could hear a bizarre pattering that sounded like a cross between running shoes and a horse. Creeping up to the door, he glanced out, and saw what might have been the 'bugs' the man on the recording was talking about. It was bright green, and looked like a cross between a centaur and an ant. Taking the unfamiliar gun in his left hand, he leaned out with his wand and tried to Stupify it.

When it exploded upon contact with the spell, he jerked back inside, carefully wiping the noxious green goo off his face before returning the gun to his belt. "Well, that escalated quickly," he muttered to himself, then with more practiced quiet, went back down the hall and stairs to the courtyard. There were signs on the railings that overlooked the burnt expanse of park, but most of them had been shattered or pock-marked from bullets. Still, he thought it was further on to his left, so he continued. Across the expanse of parks and pools, he could vaguely see other cyborgs clomping about, but the only bridge between the two sides had been shattered, drooping down into the water below, and while it would be easy to jump down to the torched grass, it would be much harder to get back up.

Some distance down was a large room, the walls covered with posters and advertisements in multiple languages, enough for Neville to be sure he had reached the mercantile district. Or, at least, the start of it – he wasn't sure if it continued on for a block or a mile. Still, there was a small flight of stairs that led up from the back of this store, so he went up, into the darkness of the storeroom. Most of the light strips were dark, so he lit up a ball of light with his wand, flicking it ahead of him to stick to a wall.

There were actually several storerooms back here, all of them closed. Luckily, it only took a few simple _Alohomora_ charms let him in. The second one made him stop, gagging, as something resembling a bright pink jellyfish had been locked inside and died curled up around itself in a corner. The smell from it was horrendous, and after closing the door, resolved to leave that room for last – just in case he could avoid it. Though he expected it would be the room he needed, Murphy's Law did not strike him, and he found the box in the fourth storeroom.

Inside were peculiar devices, clearly designed to be worn on the arm like bracers, and also clearly related to the Muggle technology at work in this place. With some trepidation, he put the "Polaris V" on his arm. With little more than a slight vibration and almost imperceptible hum, a gauntlet of orange light appeared around his arm, and after a moment he realized it was just like the display on the desk. Still, the orders he got said to read the manual first, so he rooted around in the box. No manuals.

Puzzled, Neville moved out into the hallway. His lights had started flicking out, but he decided to let them, on the chance they would alert another one of those cyborgs or the green centaur-bugs. The light gauntlet had vanished, and he carefully squeezed his fingers until it popped up again. Then, carefully looking at each section of the display, he set about experimenting with it.

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	2. Adam Jensen

Adam Jensen took a deep breath, looking one last time at the face on the screen in front of him. "If you push this button," she said, "the entire facility will be destroyed. Everyone dies. No one will be able to spin this series of events."

He put his finger lightly on the button. "Yeah," he said slowly, "that sounds about right." Closing his eyes, he pushed down with his fingers. Darkness engulfed him instantly, as every source of light suddenly failed. He blinked, and waited, but it was awfully quiet. Kind of anti-climactic, really, he was expecting far more explosions and pain. In fact, his diagnostics were reporting that he was still in perfect shape. Frowning to himself, he counted to sixty, then one-twenty, then pushed the button again.

Lights came on, and both of his eyebrows raised. He didn't know where he was now, but he sure as hell wasn't in a facility in the arctic. For starters, the walls were different, and the viewscreen was gone. Turning around, he gave a careful sweep of the room. It looked like a maintenance facility for some kind of aircar, though the three he could see didn't match any manufacturer he'd heard of. "… the hell?" he said out loud, and drawing his pistol, he moved automatically into cover behind one of the cars. There was a large garage door, though it looked unusually solid, and a smaller doorway into an office. Being a professional, he swept the office, and his eyebrows raised again at the beyond-state-of-the-art computer on the desk.

Noticing it was logged in, he took another careful look around the garage, then sat down in the chair. It was definitely a repair workshop from the documents saved to the memory, and the bills were all paid by "Citadel Security," whoever they were. Out of curiosity, he fooled around until he found what looked like a search engine, and tried to look up Sarif Industries, then cybernetic replacements. While there were any number of them, most of what was displayed looked somehow simultaneously both more and less sophisticated than what he was used to.

Still confused, he left the computer with his searches logged in, and went to the large garage door. As he reached towards the control, it activated from the other side, and Adam lost no time vaulting backwards behind a couple of sturdy-looking barrels. In walked a cyborg, visually more in line with what the security head would expect. It seemed utterly clueless, and probably rather new from the slow way he clumped between the cars towards the office. _Someone must have noticed my search_, he thought as he crept up behind it. Grinning, he tapped the cyborg on the shoulder, and as it whirled around, unleashed a full-force punch to the cheekbone.

His opponent whirled around, then caught itself against the vehicle. Adam had just enough time to think, _Oh crap_, before it unleashed a return punch to his ribs, sending him staggering back breathless. Scowling, he raised his hand, letting the laser target on his ten mil cross across the cyborg's unenhanced face. "What do you want with me?" he asked it, taking another step back to keep the distance between them from shrinking.

Still lurching forward on mismatched legs of flesh and metal, the stuttering female voice that came from the male mouth sounded especially disconcerting. "You are … inefficient. You must be upgraded." It raised one of its own hands, and while Adam couldn't recognize the specifics, it was definitely a weapon muzzle.

"Huh," he grunted, dropping his gun back into the holster. "Upgrade this," he taunted, the arm-blade swinging out of his left arm as he lunged, punching cleanly through the left side of the cyborg's abdomen as he charged past. A shudder of electricity briefly jolted him as his blade cut through some important system, and even as his enemy started to turn, his gun was back up, aimed, and firing twice.

As it fell to the ground, leaking blood and sparks, he was already turning to the open door, scanning for more opponents. It took a moment for the vista beyond to penetrate his expectations, but when it finally did, he almost dropped the gun from suddenly slack fingers. Outside the garage door was a street of sorts, but the sky above held his view. Thousands of stars, shifting and twinkling through clouds of a nebula. "Damn, this sure ain't Detroit," he observed, taking a better grip on his pistol. Sidling up to the door, he looked out at the streets.

The garage sat at the top of a T-intersection, the street before him stretching out only 300 meters or so. But the streets and the buildings showed signs of recent fighting, in the form of several fires, bullet and scorch marks, and numerous splatters of blood and other unidentifiable substances. All in all, it actually did remind him of Detroit, if the city had been picked up and thrust into deep space. Looking up, he could see part of the other structures orbiting above him, and picking out one of the brighter patches of clouds, he counted, trying to judge the rotation.

To the sides, the streets ran for long distances, further than he could make out through the haze. Dozens of aircars lay wrecked on the streets and even into the sides of some of the buildings. A barrel lay on its side a short distance off to his left, and Adam could see what looked like computer tablets scattered into the street. Looking around carefully, especially up at the buildings towering over the street, he slid down the sidewalk, crouching behind the barrel to pick up one of the tablets. Checking it carefully, he turned it on, staring at the loaded news page.

_So_, he thought, _if this is accurate, I'm now over a century in the future, in some universe where my company and probably me never existed, and humanity is just one of several advanced races. That's … nice._ Setting the working tablet back on the sidewalk, he looked up again. He was closer to one end of this space station, but the other end looked to be where all of these pieces came together. Presumably, that would be where command and control was. He hoped, anyway, since the place didn't look like any kind of human construct.

Still, it was a better goal than any other he had. Out of curiosity, he turned on his communications relay, and sent out a single squawk, just to see if anyone responded. After a minute of silence, he scanned the street again, then pulled out his pistol, replacing the two rounds he had already fired. _I've got a pistol, a sniper rifle, and a stun gun. Limited ammo for each, and given this is a different universe, probably no way to resupply._ He put the gun away, then started skulking down the street, eyes and ears alert.

He had gone perhaps a kilometer when he was forced to stop. The street he was on came to another T-intersection, and he had gathered that he was at one long edge of the arm-like structures he could see overhead. But the street before him had been blocked, and deliberately, by several crashed aircars and large metallic crates.

Looking at the buildings around him, he guessed he was either in an industrial area of some kind, or truly abysmal housing like he was used to. There would almost certainly be a way through it, but smart defenders – like whoever set up this blockade – would have set traps or sealed the entrances another way. So, that meant trying a different option. "Hello?" he called out cautiously towards the top of the blockade. "I'm Adam. Is there anyone there?"

He counted to sixty, hearing nothing but the faint crackle of flames from a burning coffee shop a block behind him. "I'm going to climb the barricade. I'd take it as a favor if no one shoots me in the face," he added, putting one hand onto a car frame. Still no response was forthcoming, so he carefully pulled himself upward. Reaching the top, he carefully raised one open hand above the top, waving it slowly back and forth, then brace an arm and pulled his head up to see beyond.

The body down below almost made him flinch back, but despite the weapon pointed in his direction, the fact remained that only half a corpse held it. Bracing himself, he leapt the fifteen feet down to the ground, and looked around. Splashes of blood, probably alien from the odd colors, were around, and now that he was close enough, he couldn't tell what species the body holding the gun was. The top of the head was covered in bony plates, with the head jutting forward from massive shoulders. The intact arm still held a shotgun, not Adam's preferred weapon, but a welcome addition. Prying it loose, he studied the weapon intently, popping out a red cylinder he supposed worked as the ammunition. There was a tiny band that served as an ammo count, which was reading only 3 rounds.

"Better than nothing," he muttered to himself, looking around. Another barricade had been built forty or so meters down, at the next intersection, looking like a particularly demented modern art project from the many multicolored blood stains covering nearly every inside inch. He moved closer, then suddenly turned back around and crouched next to the body, studying it intently before jogging over to the barricade and looking for human blood. "Weird. No flies, no insects at all," he added.

Spotting movement in one eye, he turned towards the building closer to the center of the arm, stepping up next to the doorway with the shotgun braced in one hand. "If there's anyone in there, call out now. I don't want to hurt anyone!" He gave a quick ten count, then whirled through the door, leveling the shotgun. A computer display popped up, showing an advertisement for … giant space apes performing Shakespeare. It took Adam several long moments before he could drag his train of thought back on track. He gave the living room a quick once-over, spotting two more ammo cylinders sticking out from under the couch. He dropped them into a pocket onto his cyber-bars, then went back outside.

Scaling the barricade, he looked down the two streets. He could faintly see figures moving in the smoke in the direction of the ring, now more visible against the starscape overhead. He didn't know if they were more cyborgs, civilians, or even what the sides were in this conflict. Frowning down at the street, he tried sending out another squawk on his communications implant.

Ten seconds later, a double squawk came back. Surprised, he eased backwards off the barricade to stand on the shooter's platform roughly bolted onto the inside, and tried simply saying hello. After two long minutes with no reply, he frowned, jumping back down to the ground. Glancing at the building to the inside, he went in a different door, quickly mapping the area until he found the stairs up to the rooftop. As the buildings around here went, it was fairly short, only three stories at most. From the roof, he tried again, even as he scanned the surrounding buildings.

This time, a female voice spoke back. "My name is Harper. Who is this?" From the background noise, he guessed she was either near a fire, or some large body of moving water. Maybe this space city had some kind of water recycling plant she was in?

"My name is Adam Jensen. I'm the head of security for Sarif Industries. Are you a native of this place?"

"Nope. I'm from Seattle, a private investigator. I've only been on this space station an hour or so." Seeing movement, Adam ducked behind some piece of machinery, probably an air circulation unit. Pulling out his sniper rifle, he took a closer look at the windows next door. "You?"

"According to the search I did on their version of the internet, my company and I have never existed." A cyborg moved into view, this one made from one of the alien races. He wasn't sure what the blue tentacle head was, but his sniper rifle didn't care. The shot was suppressed, shattering the window and punching through just below her jaw in a spray of blue. "You seen the cyborgs yet?"

"Um, yeah. I'm assuming you mean the ones wandering around and harvesting survivors?" The roaring in the background from her end was getting quieter, he absently noticed as he switched positions, just in case.

"You saw them taking people? And didn't stop it?" He didn't realize just how angry that made him until after he sent it.

"No, I, well," she muttered something under her breath as the transmission cut out for a moment. "What the hell, we're suddenly on a giant alien space station that's a couple million years old." He had almost no time to ponder that nugget of information before she continued. "Look, I have an ability to see the past. Almost live it, even interact to a limited extent. In the recent past, I saw the echoes of their abductions." He was quiet, digesting that bombshell long enough for her to get back on the radio. "And now you think I'm crazy, don't you?"

Nothing else moved in the other building, but forms were drawing out of the smoke below, at least half a dozen giant green bugs pressing up against the base of the barricade. Even as he watched, they started climbing atop one another, pulling out what looked like welding torches and light sabers to start dismantling his current protection. "Right now I'm looking at people-sized green ants with light sabers," he shot back, "so I'll buy your story. You say you can see the past, I believe you. Have you found a map, by chance?" Backing up, he looked across at the window he just shot out. It was a long jump, but he'd made longer.

"Yes. The nearest landmark to me is a Dilinaga Performance Hall. Let me see if I can send you a copy." He didn't quite tune that one out as he sprinted across the roof, leaping into the air and smashing through the half-broken window. Rolling heavily, he smashed into the other wall, and took a moment to regain his breath. His comm flashed an alert, and with the room apparently clear, he pulled up the attachment.

It was a map of one of the arms – if he was right, one of the arms above him. "We're in different parts of the station. If you look up, I'm in the," he paused to consult the map, "ward to the right of you." He looked down through the window, but the bugs seemed oblivious to his action. "I'm heading for the ring that connects all of them. Meet you there?"

There was the sound of a gunshot from Harper's end before she spoke. "Sure. I'll try to communicate with you in two hours. Maybe we can compare our nifty glowing tools then." _What the hell is she talking about?_ He thought. Ignoring it for the moment, he started moving through the building until he found a big enough window on the ring side of the building, then repeated his stunt to the next building in line, and again once more. Only then, far enough past the bugs (and with the next one in line currently on fire) did he descend back to the streets.


	3. Harper Blaine

I blinked blearily. Wygan had killed the Guardian, and through blurry eyes I saw Will step forward, the Grey engulfing him. In a moment that seemed to stretch slowly forward, I saw his human form dissolve, becoming part of the weave of the Grey. Even as I closed my eyes, a giant clawed hand reached out, grabbed me, and hurled me into darkness.

The noise woke me first, crackling fire and the far-off sounds of a science fiction gun firing. Followed by a shuddering boom close enough I could feel it. I cracked my eyes open, and started to raise my head, only to encounter something hard an inch or two up. Groaning, I turned, shuffling my arms around. A door slid open by my left arm, and a gloved hand reached in to brush mine. "Quiet," the man said, "they are close. Can you move?"

I took stock of myself. Aside from a headache, I had recovered from whatever Wygan had done to me. I started to reach for the Grey, and immediately retreated. Wherever I was had so many layers of Grey it felt like I was staring down the wall of the Grand Canyon. "What's going on?" I whispered, wriggling out from under the shelf in the closet.

"Not sure. Evidence suggests AI has taken control of station. Remote controlling Keepers, experimenting on residents." I didn't completely catch the last part, as I was staring at my rescuer. I didn't know what he was, though the skin and the bizarre horns reminded me of a lizard I'd seen in a pet store. "Why are you staring? Problem with Salarians?"

I ran a hand over my face, considering my options. He was either an alien, or there were far weirder creatures out there than vampires and poltergeists and Native American spirits that turned into canoes. "Honestly, I've never seen one before. How did I get into that closet?"

His eyebrows, or some close not-actual-hair equivalent rose. "Not sure. Found you here, heard you breathing. Are you armed?" As he asked the question, each hand pulled a gun from holsters at the small of his back. "Have a spare. Old, but usable. Have been hiding for four days now, was hoping to find food."

Shrugging my shoulders, I pulled back my jacket. Sure enough, my own gun was missing, so I took the offered one with a nod of thanks. No ammo spot on it, just a little temperature indicator right below the holographic sights. "Where am I? _When_ am I? What's hunting us?"

"We are in Tayseri ward, specifically a residence building near the Museum of Galactic History." At my blank look, he continued. "On board Citadel Station."

Adjusting the strap carefully, I stuck the pistol into my holster. "Yesterday, I was in Seattle, on Earth, and we didn't even have a working space program. Then I woke up in a closet on a space station a million years old." Even as I said it, part of my brain was trying to figure out where I came up with that number. His eyebrow-things went up again.

Turning around, he peeked through a window, and I took the opportunity to look outside as well. We were fairly high up in some kind of apartment building, and outside was a star and cloud vista, broken only by some other portion of the station we were on. Fires were burning in several places I could see, and I recognized the smell of blood on the air. As I watched, he floated one hand above his wrist, and a glowing hologram of orange light sprang up from his wristband. "Humanity has been in space for over a century. Your story sounds highly unlikely." Satisfied with whatever his glowy device told him, he turned it off. "Still, hostile AI takeover also highly unlikely."

He rose to his feet, and I followed him. "We should keep moving. Being detected is … bad." I trailed him to the door, and when he took out his gun, I did as well. "Can discuss your insight to the age of the station later." He moved to type a code into a panel next to the door, which was positively teeming in Grey. A smoky insubstantial hand hit the symbols a fraction of a second before my alien friend did. I shook it off, just in time to see a cyborg monster on the other side of the opening door.

My gun was up in a moment, time literally slowing down around me as I instinctively pulled on the Grey. The cyborg looked like a humanoid spider-person turned into a Star Trek Borg extra, one of the eyes pulled out and replaced with a laser pointer, a whole arm replaced with a giant cannon of some kind. As it moved in slow motion, I pulled my gun hand up, sighted down the holographic sight, and pulled the trigger.

The kick was less than I expected, so rather than going up from center body mass, the next couple of shots went down, stitching marks down its chest and abdomen, the last one punching through one leg. As it seized up, electricity arcing up and down the cyborg's body, time returned to normal for me. Just in time for my companion to stagger back, green blood pouring out from a jagged hole across one side of his chest. I dropped my gun trying to help him, but he was dead before I lowered his body to the floor.

Strange as it seemed to me, his last act had been to raise his hand and activate his glowing arm-thing. Looking at it more closely, I figured it was a language selection, as I recognized English from the list. Hesitantly, I touched the light, feeling a tingly resistance in my finger, and the display changed. I reluctantly unstrapped it from his arm, and carrying it, moved through the building. There was an elevator, or at least a shaft, crashed somewhere far below, and I turned to the emergency ladder to descend. I thought, or hoped, anyway, that any cyborgs coming to investigate their buddy's deactivation would be taking the stairs.

Three floors down, I stopped, and carefully squeezed out onto the floor. Another hallway with several doors greeted me, and all of the security systems had shadowy Grey images of their past owners. I almost moved to activate one, then changed my mind, dropping to the ground and crawling underneath one bent and jammed door. I didn't know how the cyborg found us, but it was possible that the … Salarian, wasn't it, had tipped them off by locking the door in the first place.

The apartment inside was a charred mess, thick with the smell of burned plastic and something that reminded me of burnt tinfoil. I found that pretty quickly when I found the former inhabitant, another alien species with mandibles and half-melted metallic skin. I quietly knocked the ashes off a metal chair, then set about adjusting the straps for the glowing tool until I could strap it to my arm.

Just as I was about to try searching for a tutorial on the thing, it popped up an alert. _Communication on band 29. Respond?_ I hesitated for a moment, then tapped to listen. It was a single squelch, the kind of communication you saw military squads using in the movies. "What the hell," I whispered to myself, and with a couple of quick taps, tried sending back. Nothing happened, so either my doohickey wasn't powerful enough to send back, or they were looking for some other answer.

Giving up on it for the moment, I crawled back out into the hallway, brushing soot off my jeans. The hall was a simple square with three apartments on each side, the elevator on one side and the stairs on the opposite. Hoping that any reinforcements would have already gone by, I waited for a moment by the open doorway, then stepped inside, pistol at the ready.

Only inside the stairwell could I hear the quiet tapping of feet, and I looked over the railing down the open center. Coming up the stairs were a half dozen cyborgs, all of them belonging to humanoid species. As I leveled the pistol again, I could feel time slowing down around me again. Not quite as powerful as the ability to manipulate the fabric of magic, but some part of me thought it was a whole lot cooler.

Every one of the cyborgs, as I looked closer, had a cluster of glowing strands of Grey spurting out from just above where their hip-bone was. And I thought that was where one of my shots into the one upstairs had hit, so on a hunch, I targeted the blue tentacle-head woman in the lead and gut shot her with my pistol. Sure enough, she promptly seized up, electricity arcing across her body. The others walked right over her, and behind them were a dozen giant bugs.

My time-slowing was already slipping away from me, so I started pulling the trigger madly, blowing holes in my pursuers as I stumbled up the stairs. The temperature gauge rapidly boosted until it maxed out, locking the trigger, so I stopped trying to shoot the last two cyborgs and just ran for it. Five floors later, I hit the top, still hearing them below me, and maxed out the heat sink one more time.

With just the bugs behind me, I slammed the door open, which in retrospect was a mistake. I must have ignored some safety protocol, because the sudden rush of air escaping into a vacuum yanked me out the door before it slammed closed behind me. Instinctively clawing at my throat, I virtually threw myself down into the layered past, hunting for one where I wasn't above the atmosphere line.

My feet thudded heavily into a floor a foot below the roof, and I blinked frozen tears out of my eyes. The ghost of some giant snake-person slithered past me, talking with an ape-dog in a language I almost felt I could recognize. My new Grey powers were working well enough, letting me see and interact with this memory of time even as I walked through the ghostly image of the present, following these two aliens over to the next building. I identified the door inside on the other roof, having to step partly into the snake-person to reach it, then lay on the floor to get myself inside the stairwell of the other building.

Bracing myself, I reached back to the present, sliding out of the layered past and falling five feet to the floor. The top of the stairs was filled with old smoke, and I stifled my coughing to breathe through my shirt sleeve as best I could. Two floors down, the smoke had vanished, and I stepped out into an almost identical apartment building. I picked a room at random, and moved through it to find windows that overlooked the street. The sound of a fire came through the wall to one side, and I resolved not to linger.

Crashed vehicles and collapsed buildings made a maze of the streets below, and only a football field away was the edge, looking off into space beyond. I could make out two other arms of the station curving up and away, dotted with fires of their own. The Grey was unusually thick in here, and I slid just far enough in to view.

The recent past, no more than a week, and the green bugs were breaking into the apartment. Several aliens, one of the tentacle heads and her daughter, plus a Salarian, cowering behind the couch. The bugs force the door open, and the Salarian raises his tool, firing a blast of fire through it and roasting the first bug through the door. Tentacle-lady forms a ball of glowing blue light in one hand, freezing another one in place. The other ten simply climb over their brethren, and the couch, striking down the inhabitants with cattle prods or something like it. Once paralyzed, they strap them together, forming a chain and cart the bodies away.

The buzz of my own glowy tool shook me out of it, enough that I talked back instead of just sending another squawk. As we held our conversation, I looked down at the street, some eight stories below. I could see a couple more cyborgs entering my building, but if I moved too far from the window, the communication cut off. It was odd, since I could hear the background noises going out on my own communication, but this Adam's signals were almost professional voice recordings.

We were almost done with our conversation when the first cyborg showed up, and I shot it in the kidney while talking. After we decided when to next talk, I ran past the body, shooting two more in the hallway, and on a whim, punched the elevator button. To my surprise, the door opened with a musical chime a moment later. I half-stepped inside, shooting one more cyborg, then tapped the third floor button before ducking back out and into a different apartment.

I hadn't expected the decoy to work, but it turned out flawlessly. The one left on my floor promptly turned around, heading back downstairs. Keeping quiet, I followed along behind it, and we made it to the fifth floor before it halted. Taking a deep breath, I stepped into the past.

Not too far in the past, a mere hundred thousand years, this floor was an open garden that spanned the width of the station arm. I ran across the grass, passing half-visible aliens and heading for the edge. Even as I ran, the Grey suddenly extended far past the station, filling the whole sky with inky black threads that raised the hair on my neck. I skidded to a stop, ignoring the present completely, as hundred of giant ships shaped like squids blurred into reality, the past-aliens suddenly panicking as these ships, some of them a full mile long, swarmed in.

Closing my eyes, I fought the Grey. It wanted me more solidly in that time, and I kept myself in between, each hand holding a different strand of time. When I opened my eyes again, it was almost worst than being blind, as dozens of different time spans tried to layer themselves into my vision. I backed off slowly, sliding closer to the present until I could see the building around me. The map on my tool had mentioned a concert hall, and I had stumbled into it.

From what I could see from the balcony seats, it was deserted, so I released my hold of the Grey and settled down onto a seat to catch my breath. I started muttering to myself, never a good sign, but useful to take stock of my situation. "Okay. I'm trapped on a several million year old space station. The only people I've seen are dead lab experiments or fellow displacees. I have no idea of how to stop what's happening, or where there might still be safe zones." Way to give myself a pep talk.

Pulling back up the map, I fiddled around, looking for other places to try. One caught my eye – Citadel Security Academy. On Bachjret Ward, near the ring of the Presidium, if I was reading the map right. It sounded like a police station, so if anywhere was likely to be holding the cyborgs at bay, that was probably it.

Of course, I had to cross ten kilometers on _this_ ward, then go around a good chunk of the Presidium ring to get there. But it sounded better than any of the smaller C-Sec offices listed. With a destination ready, I rose back to my feet, and headed out.


	4. Saeko Busujima

Saeko sat up, rubbing her eyes with one hand. She had been having a very nice dream, and her body still tingled underneath her bikini from the amorous fantasy. With an uncompromising gaze, she looked around the room in confusion. "When did we get off the beach?"

She lay on a bed in some bedroom, quite large by Japanese standards, though utterly devoid of any kind of personal markings. The sheets she had been laying on were plain and white, somewhat smudged from her sweat. With sudden purpose, she rose up off the bed, and began searching the room, closet, drawers, until she finally faced the truth – her sword, that exquisite katana, wasn't here with her. And the door looked like something from Star Trek and didn't have a handle on it, though when she stepped up in front of it, a green light hovered an inch off the surface.

_Did we find some kind of secret government laboratory?_ She wondered as she opened the door. For a moment, the sight of the hallway held her attention, but she'd been surviving for a week in the don't-call-them-zombies apocalypse. What did hold her eyes for so long was the sight of this dead body, a blue-skinned woman with tentacles for hair. At least, Saeko thought it was a woman, though since most of the body between the ribs and the knees was splattered against the opposite door, she couldn't be a hundred percent sure.

From appearances, she was in a hotel of some kind, not one super high class from the décor. Most annoying was the signs, which were in English and two other languages she didn't recognize. Despite classes in school, she was at least able to make out which way lay the stairs and elevator. _Aliens, super-high tech, and signs in English. Am I in that super-secret American base somehow?_ A short distance before the elevator, she paused, seeing one of the doors light up as green instead of red. Glancing around, she touched the hologram, the door swishing open.

Inside was a trio of different aliens, these ones looking like some kind of deformed bird-lizard-man with exposed skull faces, all of them dead from gunshots to the head, self-inflicted she thought. Two of them still held some kind of pistol, the third one what looked like a submachine gun, though most of his head was missing. What interested her more was a bayonet attachment, though it looked rather silly attached to so small a gun.

Picking it up, Saeko almost dropped it again when the gun suddenly shifted in her grasp, growing larger until it more closely resembled the shotgun Kohta had found. Still not ideal, but if she could hold it the right way it would give her more reach. She had picked up a little bit from listening to Kohta instruct the others on gun usage, enough to turn it over and look for where the ammunition would be loaded, popping open a slot and seeing a bright red cylinder drop out. Doing so also made a tiny display on the gun go dark, so she carefully inserted it back in. "Zero," she whispered to herself, then popped it back out.

With the practice gained from looting the medical clinic, mall, and numerous houses, she searched the hotel room, finding two more cylinders, these ones dark red, and her display lit up with a less-than-comforting "5". Still, it would work until she could find a real melee weapon.

Opening the door, she went back out, down an incongruously spotless elevator, and outside a shot-up lobby. There she stopped again, only now seeing what had left her with that subtle sense of wrongness (more than could be accounted for by aliens). The floor circled up around her into the distance, and she could see stars and clouds through the center of the circle. Not too far away was a long bridge extending out to the center of the ring, with a tower sticking off of it.

So entranced with the view, Saeko almost missed noticing the bullet that zipped past her face. Throwing herself back into the thin cover of the hotel doors, she peeked out, almost wincing as another bullet struck the wall above her. The shooter was another one of the blue tentacle-head women, only this one had half of her body replaced by mechanical parts, including one of her breasts turned into what looked like a pistol barrel.

It was too far away for her to shoot with the shotgun, at least reliably, so Saeko looked for another avenue of escape. The street outside had a rather sharp drop-off into an artificial lake, and it wasn't wide enough for the machine-alien to flank her, but jumping into unknown water didn't seem smart. There was a vehicle about ten feet past the doors, but it was probably locked, not to mention how would she drive it? But it might serve for better cover than the narrow doorway.

She swung out from the doorway, ignoring the shot that sparked off the street between her feet, and let loose with a shot. The kick from the shotgun was enough to send her tumbling onto her ass, which she turned into a backwards roll, then turned to sprint the last few steps and slide over the hood of the car. The far side was more bleak than the one she'd just left, soot-outlines of at least two people stark against the red paint.

She risked a glance, hearing the shot from her pursuer smash into one of the windows. As she thought, her blast had done little damage, only two tiny trickles of blood showing. Looking around for another weapon, she settled on picking up what looked like a soda can that had rolled slightly under the vehicle, then twisting and hurling it. Disappointingly, it bounced off the alien's face to no apparent effect. Undaunted, she picked up a second one, and hurled it also.

This one passed right in front of the gun barrel in the instant it went off, and the resulting explosion was quite a shock to Saeko. Even though she had no idea what a grenade looked like, especially an alien grenade, she still felt miffed at herself for not figuring it out sooner. But importantly, the alien was down for the count, and fearing what else would be drawn to the sound, she took the opportunity to make a quick exit.

As she trotted along the broken street, she paused frequently to check for pursuers, survivors, or simply any sign of movement beyond rising trickles of smoke. Unfortunately, the only beings she ever saw were other machine-alien or machine-human hybrids, or some strange green bug things that completely ignored any attempt to communicate with her. After the second time of trying to talk to one, and shortly thereafter getting attacked by a trio of cyborgs, she drew the obvious conclusion and avoided them too. After killing one and liberating the welding torch it was using to dismantle a crashed car.

After she'd traversed what felt like a mile, she paused next to a large elevator, looking at the signs near it. Most of them were in alien script, but a few were in English, and the one that caught her eye was something in large flaming letters. "What the hell," she muttered, and pushed the button for the elevator.

With a soft chime, the doors swung open onto a yawning elevator shaft. Saeko slowly stepped up near the doorway and peeked in, both up and down, listening to the wind whistling through it. Smoke came drifting up from somewhere below her, and shaking her head, she took a closer look at the doorway off to the side of the elevator. Obviously, this station wasn't a human construction, but still, maybe emergency stairs were universal?

The door was jammed, and it took her several minutes and two different pieces of scrap metal to force the door open all the way. It wasn't stairs inside, but a set of what looked like service tunnels, none of them lit beyond the natural light spilling in from the forced door. Fury etched on her face, Saeko whirled around and hurled the piece of scrap metal into the open elevator shaft, listening to it clatter and bang all the way to the bottom.

Unhappily, she hefted her liberated weapons, and continued moving around the ring. No telling who else might be around, but she'd better find somebody soon.


	5. Xander Harris

Xander ran through the halls of Sunnydale High, ignoring the lightweight ceiling tiles as they fell down and dodging the heavier pieces of ventilation ducts or wire bundles. The whole building felt like the Big One had just dropped into their lap, which hopefully meant that Buffy just finished kicking the First Evil in the 'nads. He leapt over another corpse, spying that wimp Andrew struggling to his feet. "Where's Anya?" he asked, then moved further without waiting for an answer.

He spied her body a few feet away, the blood-streaked blond hair barely visible behind one of the cultists. Dropping his sword in shock, he stumbled over to her, falling to his knees. In his peripheral vision he saw nerd-boy flee, and while his self-preservation was shouting at him to follow, he couldn't seem to let go of her hand. "I'm sorry, Anya," he sobbed out, and a moment later the floor dropped out from below them.

"Turn the lights off, I don't wanna go to school today," he mumbled, just awake enough to register saying it without knowing why. His one eye blinked blearily open, stinging slightly from the smoke-scented breeze. Above him was a curved ceiling, with untwinkling stars shining through clouds. "Funny, this doesn't look like California," he said to himself. Straightening his eye patch, he sat up, then instinctively reached for handholds.

The edge was only a foot away, and while Xander normally professed no fear of heights, he wasn't usually looking down from twenty stories, either. Slowly laying back down on his stomach, he stared down at the pools of water and burning trees on the curved floor far below. Shoving himself back from the edge, he sat up again, taking better stock of his surroundings. The skyway bridge he woke up on ran a few hundred feet, and he was about a third of the way out from one side, where he could see a door. "With my luck, it'll be locked," he muttered.

Rising to his feet, he took a quick stock of what he did have. Blood-spattered clothing, check. Eye patch, check. Back-up knife, check. House keys and wallet with $27, check. Taking a deep breath, he managed one step towards the nearest door when it opened, and out stepped a … actually, Xander had no idea what the hell it was. It looked like some kind of reptile, like a humanoid tortoise without a shell, but several pieces of it had been replaced by cybernetics, kind of like Adam was. "Off-limits, right? Sorry, I must have taken a wrong turn looking for the bathroom," he wise-cracked, shifting his feet to prepare to dodge.

The head on the turtle-borg tilted to the side, just like that Panasonic dog commercial, and a stuttering female voice came from it, without the obvious mouth moving at all. "Y-y-you are in-n-efficient-t-t," it said, then raised the arm that had replaced a hand with an honest-to-God chainsaw.

"I know, and I'm really working hard at raising my numbers," he said, bracing himself as it started to charge. The thing was surprisingly fast, almost vampire fast, but also vampire dumb. Xander easily dodged the chainsaw hand, grabbing it by the forearm, and with a little trip, sent it charging right over the side of the skyway and twenty stories to the pool. Leaning out a little over the edge, he watched it hit the water. "Ooh, and a six point five from the Bulgarian judge for the abysmal landing!" Whistling to himself, he sauntered towards the door.

His whistling stopped abruptly as he stepped through into the room. What had once been a conference room, or maybe a lounge, was now the clear site of a massacre. The other two exits from the room had clearly been welded shut, then carved open. Random flesh pieces were scattered around the room with bloodstains, all of them just old enough to start to rot. None of this was really new to a lifelong resident of California's Hellmouth, rather what stopped him was the color and variety of blood. Human red was represented, now dried to a flaky brown, but there was also fluid in blue, green, and purple.

In one corner of the room was also what looked like a weapons cache, though he didn't recognize any of them, and they all looked really futuristic. Then again, at first glance he was on a giant circular space station that in no way represented Babylon 5, and that was a total rip-off. He picked up the first weapon, examining it closely. That part was obviously the muzzle, and this piece where the ammo went, but aside from a couple of buttons, there was no trigger, and it seemed damned complicated to hold.

Bracing it in the crook of one arm, he tried pushing one of the buttons, and nothing happened. So he pressed the other one, and the whole thing unfolded like a Transformer, so that half a second later Xander stood there with a sniper rifle almost as tall as Willow awkwardly tucked into one arm. Written along the side of the barrel was "Brown Recluse" and below it in smaller writing was "Widow variant, SPECTRE requisitions." He had no idea what any of that meant, of course, but it said it had three rounds chambered.

A little more experimenting taught him how to eject the red cylinders that somehow served as ammunition, and his pockets were all full of the things. His Recluse was currently shrunk down, since it unfolded fast enough he thought he could deal with it. Besides, he'd faced down vampires, demons, and a seriously pissed off witch, no B-movie alien cyborg was going to get the drop on him.

Naturally, fighting through the inside of a space station was not the best place for a sniper rifle. By the time Xander managed to reach the bottom and exit out onto the park area with the lakes, he had fired his fancy rifle only a half dozen times. It was enough to leave him with a sore shoulder, though he privately blamed that on trying to fire it before the stock had fully unfolded. So far, he'd counted four different alien types, five if he counted the very first turtle chainsaw dude. The green bugs were the only ones not obviously enhanced, though the legs he shot off the one in the stairwell seemed to be equal parts robot and insect.

It was all rather bleak, kind of like what he imagined Sunnydale would have looked like had the population not suffered a sudden attack of common sense and found excuses to flee. Except that Sunnydale didn't have a portion of the town made up of metallic birds or hot blue space babes (he'd looked). Xander did make frequent stops to stare out at the stars he could see through the space clouds outside.

Finally fed up, he stopped and plopped down on a bench that was somehow untouched and unbloodied. "So. Option number one, I'm dead, and this is the weirdest Hell dimension I've never heard of." He glanced around with obvious I'm-waiting-for-the-jump-scare, and nothing obliged him. "Option two, I died and went to the Twilight Zone. The Rod Serling one, not the sparkly-gay-vampire one, because that's a Hell dimension I hope I never see. Option two has evidence in its favor."

Leaning on his unfolded sniper rifle, he stared morosely at a pool of water between him and the opposite side of the ring. "If there's an option three, I'm not seeing it here. This is one of those situations where I actually miss Giles." Looking around at his feet, he picked up a consumed ammo cylinder, long-since cooled, and flung it out into the pool. "Both options have an avenue of escape, I just need to find the way to open a portal home."

Settling back into a slouch, he looked up out the window to space, and the thin needle that rose out of the center of the ring. "Which is probably up there. I mean, it's only blazingly obvious that thing is a place of some importance. I just have to find the way inside. Maybe see if anyone else is stuck in the nuthouse along with me." Feeling proud of himself for reaching a decision, he sprang to his feet, narrowly and obliviously saving himself from the reaching hand of a Keeper that had walked up behind the bench. "Onward! For glory and hot alien space babes!"

Turning to continue his trek around the ring of the Presidium, he finally saw the green alien bug, and even as it scuttled around the bench to reach him, he reared back and planted a steel toe right between its eyes. As it swayed, attempting to regain its composure, he swung the collapsed rifle like a baseball bat, impacting right below the jaw, cracking the carapace. Just to add insult to injury, he picked up a piece of the protective railing that had broken off, and pulling a flying leap from the bench, impaled it right through the back of the lower body.

"Oh god, you things stink on the inside," he lamented as he walked away, the Keeper still attempting to reach him despite the ichor leaking out of it. Settling his weapon on one shoulder, he returned to his casual saunter.


	6. Blackjack

Blackjack felt the strange sensation of her soul separating from her body, joining the green-ringed glow that circled Hoofington. It was distinctly odd, feeling and seeing things without a body to do it with, so she didn't really take it as odd or dangerous when a giant butterfly net made of blackly-glowing light formed out of nothing, captured her, and suddenly flung her back out into the void.

At first, she hoped it meant that the soul-stealing spell had been broken after all. The only sensation she could feel was a bed beneath her, the sheets soft and smelling of artificial lavender. The air was pungent with dust and copper, and she tried to blink, realizing belatedly that her cybernetics were all offline. Naturally, this presented something of a problem, leaving her blind, deaf, and unable to walk.

"Hello?" she cautiously tried saying, or at least she thought she did, since her hearing was just as offline. A moment later, feeling suddenly returned to her forelimbs with a feeling like a wash of static. Her hearing returned a moment later, bringing with it the faint sounds of rhythmic music. She unsteadily rose to her hooves, trying to get her bearings as she felt her way off the humongous bed, tripping to the floor just as her sight finally resolved in a wash of blurry pixels.

"Anypony there?" she asked again, a little louder, as she looked around. If it wasn't for the odd light strips, Blackjack would almost swear she was in a Stable bedroom. The bed was big enough to fit any three ponies she knew, and that thought brought with it the question of where her friends were and how they made it out of the prison. Looking around, she tried pulling open one of the drawers, which was filled with very oddly-shaped clothing.

She nudged the drawer closed, and took a better look around. One corner of the room held what looked like a shower, though she felt remarkably clean. Her barding was still damaged and torn, but clean, and her PipBuck said the background radiation was absolutely nothing. Down a pair of short stairs was a desk, and an exit. Trotting down to the desk, she looked at the oddly-shaped chair, which looked like it was designed for midget Diamond Dogs, and a flickering holographic display on the desk in a language she didn't recognize.

Turning to the door out, it took her several moments to figure out how to open the door. Feeling slightly foolish for not recognizing the green panel sooner, she levitated out a shotgun from her pack, keeping it by her side as she stepped out into a hallway ranged with storage lockers, a couple of them open and empty, the rest locked. Another door at the end was closed, the panel off and several wires cut.

Grumbling to herself, she started patching wires together, interrupted several times as she managed to shock herself thanks to metal fingers. Finally the panel turned from red to green, and the door slid open. Blackjack's first impression was that of Stable 99's atrium turned raider den again, and it took a moment before she could shake off the comparison. A round bar stood in the center of the room, numerous tables placed around the periphery of the room. Dancing strobe lights lit up the outer walls, and the scent of old blood was heavy on the air.

Flattening her ears against the loud music, she cautiously picked her way across the empty room, pausing only to pick up two abandoned pistols she didn't recognize, but her PipBuck eventually identified as Shurikens. The lights were already giving her a headache by the time she reached the opposite door, stumbling out into an open walkway with relief. Then she stopped to get her bearings, staring up at the building towers that surrounded her.

Then her eyes went even further up, staring at the distant clouds masking the bright points of light she recognized as stars. "Where in all Equestria is this?" she asked herself quietly. For several minutes she simply stood there, head tilted back as she stared at the sky rotating past the light-studded bars of darkness. When she finally lowered her head, she received her second shock of the hour.

There was a corpse not too far away from her, though of a species she didn't recognize. It looked rather like someone had crossed a lizard with a diamond dog, leaving a bipedal figure taller than she was, though still slender and weak-looking. Another one of those pistols was clutched in his hand, and several bullet holes crusted with green-ish blood spoke to his fate. After a moment of staring at the creature, Blackjack decided to try something different.

She extended the fingers of her right forehoof and tried pinching herself. When that didn't work, she tried it somewhere more sensitive. But nothing changed, and this certainly didn't feel like a dream. With some reluctance, she pried the pistol from the corpse's hand, and moved around the rectangular walkway, peeking over the side at a street some two stories below her. The smell of burned flesh hung in the air, and eddies of smoke moved about on unfelt currents. Another door led off the walkway, so she opened it and headed through.

The small passageway here was thick with the scent of ozone, and the door directly before her had not just been disabled, but then welded closed, and then plates of metal welded atop that. Off to her left she could hear the sound of gunfire, so keeping her shotgun at her side, she reluctantly headed in that direction. The passage here resembled nothing quite so much as a dingy alleyway, filled with refuse and dead bodies, none of them a match for the lizard-thing but all built upon the same lines – two blue things with abnormally large chests and tentacles on their heads, something with blue blood in heavy armor missing its head, and two brownish things covered in hair. Picking up all of their weapons, she moved forward slowly, staying in the cover of the many large boxes and crates left here.

When the gunfire was just ahead of her, Blackjack carefully stood up on her hind legs to look over a crate, to see a pinkish monkey-thing like the two brown ones she passed, two more of the blue things, and another lizard, all stuck behind a barricade hastily assembled from boxes. Their attackers were more aliens, only these ones had been merged with mechanical parts in a fashion worse than even Deus had been. "Hit 'em with another singularity!" the pink one shouted, and one of the blue ones stood up long enough to fling out a hand.

In the air behind the cyborgs, a pulsing black sphere appeared, levitating a half dozen of the cyborgs off the ground to float, defenseless but not helpless, as they proved by universally opening fire on the blue tentacle creature. With a cry of rage, the lizard-thing jerked up, orange light surrounding one hand for a moment as a blast of fire arced over the standing opponents to explode on the floating ones. The body of his fallen comrade was left to lay where it fell.

Reaching a decision, Blackjack dropped the shotgun quickly into her packs, pulling out her sniper rifle and slipping into SATS. With no hesitation, she lined up headshots on three of the cyborgs, and felt the gun shudder in her telekinetic grip as it blasted away. The three survivors all quickly glanced over their shoulders at the shots, but while they could see her gun, the unicorn was hidden from view. Two of her shots downed their targets, while the third just snapped off a bizarre laser-beam-optic device but doing no further harm.

The gunfight continued for another tense minute, as the supply of cyborgs seemed to be nearly limitless. To make it more frustrating for the security pony, some of the enemy seemed to have some kind of magical shield up, as her shots would unexpectedly strobe the air around them in shades of blue or purple but doing little, if any, damage. Their own upgrades served as well to deflect or blunt otherwise deadly attacks.

By the time they finished, with at least fifty dead opponents, the other blue tentacle creature was dead as well, and the pink monkey was leaking blood from a nasty scalp wound, courtesy of one of the cyborgs exploding. Putting away her sniper rifle and taking a deep breath, she prepared to meet the strange creatures ahead of her. "I'm coming out now," she called ahead of her. "Please don't shoot me?"

"Why would we shoot the person who just saved HOLY CRAP!" the pink one cried out, his voice rising in a shriek as she stepped around the corner. Immediately she hunkered down, prepared to throw herself back into the dubious shelter of the wooden box, but the lizard one grabbed the muzzle of the machine gun and forced it towards the floor. "It's another cyborg, damnit!"

"Different," the lizard spoke swiftly. "Talking normally, shot at other borgs, asked politely for cease fire. We should honor it." Releasing the gun and turning to face her fully, it dipped its head in a quick bow. "Major Kirrahe, Salarian Special Tasks Group. This is Conrad Verner," as he waved at the pink one, "human make-believe hero."

She stared at them a moment longer, then took a few steps closer, bowing her own head politely. "Blackjack, also known as the Security Pony, and occasional idiot hero of Hoofington." Sitting back on her haunches, she waved a forehoof around. "Where the buck _are_ we?"

"I've finally snapped," Conrad said, mostly to himself as he sagged slowly to the floor, his back against their barricade. "I'm sitting here having a conversation with a friendly cyborg horse sniper."

"I'm a unicorn, not a horse," Blackjack retorted irritably, pushing just enough magic into her horn to make it glow. "And you still haven't answered my question."

The two beings looked at each other, Kirrahe's eyes wide. "Apologies, but I have never heard of your species before. We are on Citadel Station." At her growl, he shrugged, spreading his two-fingered hands wide. "I do not have a point of reference to say where in the galaxy we are compared to your homeworld."

She opened her mouth, then paused, asking a different question than the first one that had come to her mind. "Home_world_? Where is this station?"

They shared a glance again. "Citadel Station is in the middle of a nebula, about fifty thousand lightyears from my homeworld, a lot closer than that to his. Out in the middle of space, no space debris like planets or asteroids to get in the way."

"We're out in the middle of the _stars_?" she cried? Rising to her feet, she ran back through the alley and out to the open walkway, staring back up at what she thought was the sky. Suddenly the endless spinning stars made perfect sense – there was no sun here, no moon, just endless turning night above her head. Groaning, she slumped to the floor, splaying out and fighting off a sense of vertigo.

Dimly, she heard the two beings again, and after a few moments pulled herself together enough to pay attention. "- makes no logical _sense_. How does a fictional being appear in the middle of this?"

"Don't know. I'm a soldier, not research scientist. Can think of a few salarians who'd be quick with a theory. None of them are here." She slowly struggled to her feet as they approached her. "Must ask. How did you arrive?"

She sat for a moment, pressing her forehooves over her optics, then nodded, body language they apparently understood. "I have no idea. The last thing I was aware of was my soul being ripped from my body by that curse … then I woke up on a bed in there."

Kirrahe gestured sharply with his head, and sighing heavily, Conrad hefted the large, multi-barrel gun onto his shoulder to scope out the club. "Interesting. Curse implies either actual magic, or gross misunderstanding of modern technology and biotics. Extensive cybernetic replacement counters second option. Or counter-intuitive terminology. Does your species have knowledge of element zero?" he asked, then shrugged. "Interpreting your expression as no. How does your magic work?"

Still blinking at him somewhat stupidly, she demonstrated by levitating out one of the pistols she acquired in the bar, the glow surrounding her horn and the gun faint but visible. "I'm not the most qualified unicorn, I can't do a whole lot more than telekinesis, make light, and sometimes a magic bullet spell. I, ah, don't want to try that without a target."

The salarian nodded, prepared to ask another question, when the whisk of the door and the thumping music interrupted him. "Conrad! Is it clear?" They both turned, but before Blackjack had fully turned to face the door, a massive explosion blew her into the air. She briefly caught a glimpse of Kirrahe, blue shields strobing around him as he returned fire, and a humongous bison-looking cyborg with a rocket launcher growing out of one shoulder.

Then the safety railing around the walkway cut off her view, and she was spinning down. She focused hard on her horn, light spilling out of it, and she didn't quite slam into the street below. Most of the lights here had been either shot or burned out, so she took the opportunity to scurry into the shelter of an overturned car before pulling out a healing potion. Even as she raised it to her lips, though, she hesitated. She had a limited supply, was so far from home she didn't even know what direction to look, and was surrounded by an enemy of indeterminate number.

"Better save it," she murmured to herself, sticking her head up to scout over the car.

A moment later, just as she started to slip around the car back towards the direction of the club, the voice nearly sent her shrieking in panic. "Better save what?" Her head whipped around wildly for a moment before her brain reached the conclusion that it had come from her foreleg. The explosion must have hit her PipBuck and caused it to go into transmit mode.

Taking a breath, she hunkered back down behind the car. "My, uh, my healing potions." Nothing came through, then the sound of a blast of energy followed by a large splash echoed tinnily from the tiny speaker. "You okay over there?"

There was a grunt, then a muffled, "Yeah." While she waited for more, Blackjack snuck down the street, cowering under a half-falling sign for a noodle shop. "Healing potions, huh? You a wizard too?"

_What's a wizard?_ She thought to herself, seeing something moving ahead of her in the dim smoke and pulling out her shotgun. "Not exactly." The shape resolved to some kind of giant bug, easily as big as she was, slowly carving apart a crashed car that blocked the entrance to the next building over. "You seen the green bug things?"

"Shoot it!" came the hurried response, and a quick check confirmed: red bar meant a hostile … at least usually. "They're working with the cyborgs," he said again, sounding worried to Blackjack's ears. Sliding into SATS, she lined up three shots, one on the welding torch and two headshots. The echo of the shots hadn't faded yet before the headless carapace exploded.

"What the hell? It blew up on me!" she complained, scraping the foul-smelling muck off her muzzle.

"They do that," he replied. "Smell like crap, too. My name's Neville. What's yours?" She wasn't entirely sure she could trust the voice on the other end, but he had just helped her, and the only other people to do so had just taken a couple rockets to the face. Wherever this station was, it seemed just like the Wasteland.

"Blackjack. Yes, like the card game." There was a moment of silence before she continued, picking her way carefully through the splattered bug insides. "Don't take this the wrong way, but what species are you?"

"No offense taken, and I'm human. Are you one of the alien species that live here? I've seen a couple bodies." He sounded curious, and she paused next to the wreckage of what might have been an elevator.

"Nope. I'm a unicorn." She leaned up, sticking her head past part of the wreckage. Yep, elevator shaft, and no way she was going to try climbing that, cyborg fingers or not. "No idea how I got here, where I am, and I don't think we're from the same world, because I met my first human a few minutes ago."

"There's more survivors?" he said excitedly.

She sighed. "Not anymore." More silence as she moved further down the street. "Rocket launcher to the face."

There was more silence from her conversation partner as she skirted several wrecked crates, looking like they'd been shoved off one of the buildings nearby. "Look for a way to the Presidium. I'm near the human Embassy."

"Sure," she replied, still somewhat morose. "What's an embassy?" Score, an open door, of a store boasting a sign claiming to be a weapons emporium. The inside was trashed, of course, but if she could take a couple of minutes, she might find something useful, like maybe ammo for those pistols she picked up earlier.

"It's a set of diplomatic offices," came a different voice from her PipBuck. "And let's get off the line, the cyborgs can track your signals. My name is Harper, I'll try and meet you there."

Though now nervous to say any more, she kept the communications open while she searched the store, finding a half dozen red cylinders that seemed to act as ammo for the Shurikens. Reluctantly she disabled the signal, and slipped back out onto the street.


	7. Meetings: Harper and Neville

_Author's Note: For those who haven't figured out who the main characters are, I'll list them here for your convenience._

_First, Neville Longbottom is obviously from Harry Potter. If you didn't know that, please move out from under a rock and join the rest of the world._

_Second, Adam Jensen is the protagonist of the game Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I originally considered using JC Denton from the original Deus Ex, but in the end thought that Adam was both easier to drag in, and probably better remembered by everyone including myself. Also, he's got arm-blades and punches through cement walls, and JC never did that._

_Third, Harper Blaine, protagonist of the Greywalker series by Kat Richardson. She's an awesome writer if you love urban fantasy, and her power set is fairly unique. Harper is one of the characters I will probably do more exposition on/about, as several reviewers already have asked what continuity she's from. For those who liked the first person view, I probably won't be doing more, as I find it really hard to write first-person for other people's characters._

_Fourth, Saeko Busujima, from the anime Highschool Of The Dead. I learned of it from watching AMV Hell, and for a series that's half fanservice, the characters are really well written. I also considered using Kohta instead, but went with Saeko mostly so that someone in the party would be non-proficient in ranged weaponry._

_Fifth, Xander Harris, also obviously from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I did consider carefully taking the comics as canon, but since I haven't read all of them, I stuck with dragging him from the last episode of the tv show. And yes, he fired a Black Widow sniper rifle without any augmentation or genetic upgrades, because I figure after seven years of surviving vampires, demons, and Anya, he's just that badass._

_Sixth, Blackjack, who is from the fanfic Project Horizons, part of the Fallout: Equestria set. Yes, you read that right, I someone came up with the idea of crossing My Little Pony with a post-nuclear apocalypse, and it is _epic_. For you bronies out there, Somber gave me the OK._

_Lastly, yes, there's a seventh person in this, who Harper encounters here and who sent Neville those messages. I'm not saying who it is until the epilogue, and I plan to smile enigmatically to any reviews who guess wildly at his identity._

_- BlueNinja_

Finishing his conversation with the unicorn (and some part of his mind couldn't stop saying "How cool is that? I can't wait to tell Luna!"), Neville stopped to take some stock of his surroundings. He had started at the embassy, true, but he'd moved across a couple of kilometers now, Apparating across long distances and walking across short ones. He'd seen no sign of other survivors, other than his communication with the glowing "omni-tool."

He'd seen and faced a dozen bugs and twice that many cyborgs. Whatever malevolent thing was guiding them (the green-lined hologram woman?) had learned quickly that the bugs were quite vulnerable to his magic. The cyborgs were tougher, but the Hexus spell (and trust Hermione to find an anti-Muggle jinx from an American) would knock a group of them dizzy for a few seconds, enough to hit them with something more powerful.

Ducking into a room labeled "C-Sec Security Room 11D", he moved around behind a desk, crouching over a puddle of dried blue-purple blood and fiddling with his omni-tool again. His mysterious benefactor had sent him another message in an obviously disguised voice, telling him to keep going this way. He didn't think that Blackjack was his messenger, but maybe Harper? She seemed to have a better grasp of what was going on than he did.

On a hunch, he tapped his tool over to transmit. "Harper? Quick question." He waited a few seconds, but got only silence. Then the door in the back of the room opened, and three of the metallic-skin skull-face alien-cyborgs lumbered out. "I wish I had Gryffindor's sword again," he complained to himself as he hexed them, then tore two of them apart with Expelliarmus before shooting the third one in the face.

"I told you to get off the line," Harper's voice suddenly came through.

"Yeah, about that," he said as he picked his way over their bodies to grab a box of ammo cylinders and empty it into the belt pouch he'd made from an abandoned tourist t-shirt. "How'd you figure that out?"

There were several more seconds of silence, during which he left the C-Sec room and continued a little further along, stopping near a giant elevator that looked still intact. "It's rather simple," she drawled sarcastically. "Every time I tried talking to anyone, a couple of borgs showed up." He leaned over the slanted clear doors, staring down the shaft, but the elevator, if it was still intact, was far enough down he couldn't see it. On a hunch, he pushed the call button. "Same thing if you start punching in security codes, using the computers, or things like that."

Blinking, he looked at the call button, glowing bright green. "Like summoning an elevator?" he asked lamely.

"Exactly like summoning an elevator, genius." Looking around wildly, Neville dashed for a crashed aircar with darkly tinted windows, jerking open the door and tumbling inside. Through the dark glass, he watched the elevator arrive, a dozen bugs clambering out of it to look around. Smiling, he Apparated the short distance inside it and pushed the button. As the bugs turned around, he waved right before the elevator dropped out of their sight. "Please tell me you didn't just summon an elevator," her voice came back, slightly marred by static.

"Alright, I won't tell you," he replied jovially.

"You're hopeless. And I'm going offline. I need to duck through the past again to get past these cyborgs." Before he could ask what any of that meant, there was a final-sounding click, and his omni-tool now said there were no active receivers within range. He tried cycling through a couple of other communication channels, but the message didn't change.

At the bottom, before the doors slid open to allow three dozen cyborgs to perforate him, he Apparated again, this time to the roof of a warehouse-looking building. As they shambled about in confusion, he took up randomly sniping them with curses, teleporting around to different sheltered positions.

Harper cut off her tool with irritation. Whoever the British man was, he certainly had a pair of brass cojones, but she had doubts about teaming up with someone that reckless. Peeking around the corner one last time at the trio of well-armed giant ape-cyborgs, she slid a few layers backwards, to the next fully stable layer fifty thousand years in the past.

She slid through a crowd made up primarily of brown bug people, occasional splotches of color showing their servant races. Nothing she'd seen yet signified why the major layers seemed to shift backwards every fifty thousand or so years, and while it was a point of interest, it mattered less than making sure the cyborgs didn't install lead-lined air conditioning in her.

Ghosting through the crowd, bits and pieces of conversation struck her, almost intelligible, straining her concentration as she struggled to keep in view both the past she walked in and the present she needed to return to. Thus the shock that came from someone grabbing her by the arm almost threw her back into the present in the midst of the cyborgs. "Not that way," the fur-covered person grated out. "That way, 200 steps." He released her arm, and stepped backwards behind one of the bug people, literally vanishing from sight.

For several seconds, Harper simply stood there, staring at where he went, until one of the bugs stepped through her ghostly body, sending a shiver through her spine. Turning, she counted off the steps, then slipped back into the present. The room was dark, but her omni-tool gave enough light to see the outlines of futuristic medical equipment. Near the door was a red box with a white cross on it, and with some surprise, she popped it open to find several packets labeled "Medi-Gel."

She took several minutes to do a more thorough search, eventually finding a portable doctor's bag filled with bottles and syringes in alien text. Casually dumping it all out on a metal tray, she slipped all the gel packets into the bag and strapped it around her waist. Maybe futuristic medicine wasn't so bad after all. Slipping back into the grey, she moved through the door, dropping back into the present in the hallway outside.

Wherever this was now, it wasn't connected directly to the exposed streets, which she hoped was a good thing. Instead, a long hallway, lined with various offices for medical clinics, travel agencies, tax specialists, and numerous signs in alien script that Harper could only guess at. She moved down the passage in silence, gun at the ready. After a few hundred yards, it ended at a left turn, a glowing sign indicating that the Presidium lay in that direction. _At least I'm not lost_, she thought grimly.

The last store before the end was a café, and through the hallway door she could see bursts of light and hear sporadic gunfire. Crouching down, she ghosted through the door again, slipping through a store only filled with ghostly echoes, and solidified near the shot-out window, still crouched behind the nearly waist-high sill.

The scene outside was near chaos, as red and green beams of light came flickering across the plaza, only from one direction at a time, but changing origin every few seconds. One of the cyborgs had its back to her, so she took the opportunity to stitch a series of holes up her spine, her shots lost in the cacophony of a dozen other borgs blasting wildly away every time the light-beam appeared.

Each one took out an alien in a different fashion, sometimes ripping them apart, causing components to spontaneously explode, or opening slashes with invisible blades. Harper took out a few more with careful, time-slowed shots, and despite a rush of reinforcements, the battle was over fairly quickly. Harper had just started to rise, when a pop of displaced air echoed, and a blood-spattered man in slacks and a red and gold sweater suddenly appeared, his back not quite to her.

He stood there for a moment, surveying his handiwork, then winced, bending down and clutching one calf. Looking slightly into the Grey, she could see the wounds inflicted on him, none of them serious. But what truly held her view was the small beam of golden light still clutched in his right hand. She rose slowly, hopping over the broken window as he collapsed to the ground.

As she approached, he started to raise what she recognized as a wand, and she held up empty hands as she continued towards him. "Hold still, let me see what I can do," she said soothingly, and he dropped the wand hand and lay back on the street with a groan. "How many times have you been shot?" she asked incredulously, realizing the red on his sweater wasn't supposed to be a bizarre tie-die pattern.

"Too many," he squeezed out painfully, and her hands fumbled at the zipper of her bag as she recognized the voice. "Good timing though, I'll grant you that," he said, then slumped bonelessly the rest of the way, unconscious at last.

Grimly, she pulled out one of the gel packs, skimmed the instructions quickly, then looked at the sweater. "Sorry about this, Neville," she told him, and grabbing at one of the bullet holes, ripped the garment apart before slathering gel over all the holes in his torso. The leg wound was low enough to reach without destroying any more of his clothing, and she took a brief moment to admire his physique. For a teenager, this kid was _ripped_!

A shot cracked out from down the street, and she yanked out her pistol long enough to gut-shot another cyborg and literally de-arm one of the bugs. He jerked awake at the gunfire inches above his head. "I feel surprisingly good right now," he told her, and hexed a second cyborg, causing half its head to explode. "What do you say we get out of here and find somewhere a little quieter?"

Glancing back at him, she raised an eyebrow, rewarded with a sudden blush. "I hope that wasn't a pick-up line," she said humorously. "I wanted to get to the Presidium, which is that way." She gestured at her destination with her pistol before picking off another bug.

"Sure thing, no problem," he said. "After fighting Death Eaters, these guys are surprisingly easy. Just numerous. _Sonorous_!" he shouted, a solid wave of sound sending two bugs flying. "Ready?" he inquired, grabbing her arm, but before she could even open her mouth to respond, they vanished, reappearing a hundred feet away inside what had once been a tourist booth.

Blinking, she rubbed her eyes. "Ow. Next time warn me before you turn us into threads of light." Wiping away tears from the sudden shock of seeing everything in the Grey without causing it herself, she looked around. "The elevator's right there?"

He nodded, then rested his wand on the counter edge, firing off a couple of red bursts, causing the bugs to explode. "Yes. Pretty easy to teleport out before the doors open."

Harper shook her head. "I have a better idea. My turn for the weirdness now." She took his arm, took a deep breath, and thrust them backwards in time. Surprisingly, the brown bug people had the elevator in the same place, though otherwise the plaza ahead of them had been turned into what looked like a slave auction. "Quit the gaping, and don't dare let go of me," she warned him, and they moved up the street, joining a group in the elevator.

The past-echo brought them up to the Presidium, and they walked out carefully, her pulling him off to the side to take shelter before they returned to the present and he discovered they were behind what might have been a bulletin board or map. "That was _awesome_," he whispered, eyes glinting with reflected firelight from a still-burning aircar not too far away. "What _was_ that?"

She took a couple of deep breaths, scanning the area before answering. "It was an … echo of the past, sort of. That was fifty thousand years ago." Rising, she smirked a bit at his stunned impression. "This station has been around for somewhere in the hundreds of _millions_ of years, but," she frowned, pausing her narrative to think through her words carefully as they skulked down the walkway back towards the embassy.

Finally deciding on how to say it, she pulled them aside, back into the C-Sec room. Something was off about it, but Neville didn't really have a chance to figure out what before she continued. "I'm a Greywalker. What we just did, moving through the past, that's greywalking. This station has _layers_ going back into the past, and while I can't be completely sure, all the most recent ones are at fifty thousand year intervals, almost like clockwork."

He moved over to the desk, settling his butt on the edge and frowning in thought. "So," he said slowly, "every fifty thousand years, for the last, what, million?" He took her hand wobble as assent. "And if the last one was fifty thousand years ago, then we just _happened_ to get here right in the middle of repetition eleventy-one?" He stared at the floor for a moment, then his brain finally put together the subtle clues. "Where's the cyborgs I shot an hour ago?"

She stared at him for a moment, then looked at the still-fresh blood stains on the floor, and lunged at him, thrusting them both into the Grey a moment before the desk exploded. Latching onto each other tightly, it took them several minutes of walking through different crowds of aliens in different layers of time before Harper felt confident enough to return them to the present. "That was too damn close," he grumbled, finally wiping sweat from his palms.

"No kidding." She looked up and down the walkway, and out across one of the intact bridges over the waterway that spanned the center of the Presidium. "Ready for more risk? I'd like to message Adam and Blackjack, let them know these things are getting more cunning."

He nodded, then stopped. "Adam?"

"He's some security specialist from Detroit. I only caught part of your conversation, so who's Blackjack?" She fiddled with her omni-tool, and he grinned, holding up his own model.

"She's a unicorn. Really, that's what she told me," he protested to her incredulous look. "I mean, I'm a wizard, and you've got your own magical powers that I've never even _heard_ of before."

"You're a wizard? What, like Gandalf?"

"Who's Gandalf?"

They stared at each other in mutual incomprehension before Harper cracked a smile and shook her head. "Doesn't matter. I'll call Adam, you call Blackjack. They're on different frequencies, so hopefully once we meet up, we can get all of our communications worked out."

Back to back, they made their respective calls, eyes darting constantly as they searched for the threat they knew would be coming.


	8. Meetings: Saeko and Xander

Saeko stared out the massive window, taking in the view while her hands automatically reloaded her shotgun. Kohta still would be appalled at her horrible accuracy, but he'd probably be impressed at the way she just decapitated one of the human-type cyborgs. They were an improvement over Them in only one way, they didn't smell. Unfortunately, their sense of sight was working just fine, even if some of them were missing eyeballs.

The view outside was well worth the view, and part of her was sad that her other friends couldn't be there to enjoy it. From the room on the outside wall of the ring, she stared out at the five arms that made up the rest of this space stations as they extended out into the void, lights and fires visible. They were somehow set away from the ring, by the height of a skyscraper at least, and she looked at one directly below her. The elevator she passed was probably the way down there, though presumably the dark tunnels were for emergencies or something.

Unfortunately, her shotgun didn't come with a flashlight attachment, nor had she been able to find a regular one. In fact, for all the futuristic technology, they seemed awfully short on anything other than handheld tablets. Maybe they had some kind of cybernetic implants that eventually made them go berserk? It was futile to speculate. At least they did have some awesome clothing.

One of the places she stopped to loot was a clothing shop that, if she was to judge by the artistic silhouettes on the walls, catered to the blue tentacle-head women. The black, skin-tight outfit, with strategic cutouts, would probably have given Komura an instant nosebleed, and as much as that thought made her smile, it also let her turn her swimsuit into a sling to hold her looted ammo packs.

Exiting into another hallway, she frowned at the sign. She was no slouch in high school, but English had never been her best subject. Still, she thought that word meant "restaurant?" With nothing better to do, she headed that way. Ammo was good for survival, but if the devastation here matched what she left in Japan, food and water would be more important. The lakes outside might not be safe, especially given the round dwarf figure that had exploded in one of them.

Most doors were sealed with the red holograms, but even the ones that weren't locked were generally empty of anything useful. A quick glance was all she usually needed to tell if it was worth spending more time. And there was the added downside that every door she opened was a chance to bring more cyborg-people down on her head. Too bad she didn't have a way to lure them in as a distraction.

The hallway ended at another elevator, and while this one looked like it was in use, Saeko was still feeling paranoid enough not to call it right away. She spent a few minutes scouting the area around the elevator plaza before deciding on a worthwhile vantage point. Moving quietly over to the call button, she smacked the green hologram and dashed to her hiding spot.

Her caution was rewarded by the interminably long time it took the elevator to arrive, somewhere at least a minute long. Seconds after the elevator door opened, four cyborgs, two human and two the metallic-skeletal ones, clumped into the plaza from the hallway she had exited. Embracing her dark combat goddess within, she whirled out from inside the holographic advertisement, shotgun blazing. Since all of them were facing the elevator, she got off two shots before they turned around, knocking one of the metallic cyborgs into the elevator.

Rolling closer and dodging their shots, she planted one foot firmly in the crotch of the male human cyborg. Disappointingly, it didn't seem to react to her full-force kick, though it did go rolling backwards to crash into the one she shot to end with both of them in a tangle in one corner of the elevator. The other skull-faced one had managed to stitch a line of bullets across the woman cyborg trying to track her, and it was making a clicking noise as the shotgun barrel in its abdomen dry-fired.

Her bayonet took the skull-face one in one knee, toppling it into the path of its two compatriots before they could extricate themselves, and her back stroke with the gun butt hit the abdomen barrel hard enough to tear the flesh surrounding it. With a resounding shout, she flipped up behind it, ramming the blade home into the base of the neck, severing the spinal column with a tingle of electrical discharge.

Before the three remaining could recover from their mostly-superficial injuries and continue their attack, she hit the elevator button again, watching the transparent doors shut and begin the very slow descent back down to the giant arm of the station below. That took care of one more group, she thought, and there were only untold million more where they came from.

Heading out a different hallway, she did in fact find a restaurant of sorts. She remembered seeing an anime like this, a giant wall that was essentially a solid vending machine fifty feet long and five feet tall. It was remarkably untouched, and still powered, and required some kind of local currency she hadn't managed to find despite the number of stores and corpses she'd looted. In fact, it only seemed to take some kind of electronic interface.

Grinning to herself, she walked the length of the vending machine, finding what looked like the "human" section, with pizza, sandwiches, fruit, and several other things she couldn't recognize. Humming quietly to herself, she turned the shotgun bayonet on the machine, tearing several of the doors open to acquire two slices of pizza, a bottle of water, and a box of what turned out to be vegetable chow mein. Chomping on the pizza with her left hand, holding her weapon in her right, she ducked quickly out of the store before the inevitable alarm brought more cyborgs, or worse, giant green bugs.

Finding another abandoned office with an unintelligible sign in English, she brushed off a seat and lounged behind the desk, shoveling food into her mouth hurriedly. Finishing in record time, she had just regained her feet when a trio of cyborgs came into view. Muttering to herself, she dropped behind the half wall and shattered remains of a window.

Tossing off a shot blindly, she crawled closer to the door, waiting as the first one stepped inside and ripping its belly open with the bayonet and pulling the trigger, cutting it nearly in half. The second one kicked its companion away, and she barely rolled out of the way of its own shotgun blast. Even though she knew she would never get the gun back on target in time, she tried, knowing it was futile.

In what seemed like slow motion, her gun came around on target half a second after its head exploded, spraying her in brains and random cybernetic pieces. This was good enough to let her shoot the third one, and she stepped outside to look for any more threats. What she realized a moment too late was that the sniper shot had also passed close enough to rip apart one shoulder of her outfit, and the sharp metal or plastic or whatever pieces had shredded the _other_ shoulder.

The net result being that the moment she went out the front door of the office onto the main drag of the Presidium, her entire outfit peeled down the front of her body, exposing her breasts for several moments until she could spare a hand to grab it and keep it from falling any further. Cheeks flaming, she looked around to see who her savior was, and caught sight of a human man standing on the opposite side of the lake.

In disappointment, she heard him call out in American-accented English, and shouted back to him in Japanese, "I don't know what you're saying!" She hoped that his verbal response meant the same, but he pointed off to her left, then used the tip of his sniper rifle to sketch a _200_ in the air. Looking down that direction (and carefully keeping her shotgun covering her nipples) she saw a bridge about two hundred meters away. She waved a hand in that direction, and both of them started jogging towards it (somewhat awkwardly on Saeko's part).

The center part of the bridge was jammed with crumpled vehicles, several of them having slammed together before or after crashing into the bridge, she couldn't be sure, but it meant she had to pick her way across, feeling quite exposed. Ducking down on the other side, she risked a glance back, seeing a half dozen of the green bugs trotting blithely past. "Hi," came from behind her, and she almost beheaded her rescuer.

He was fairly handsome, though the eyepatch covering one eye was more than a little creepy. Still, after a very brief glance, he kept his eyes on her face admirably. Gesturing to her outfit, he pulled out a small knife, and removed the patch, showing her the ruin of what had been his eye, gesturing to her torn outfit. Blushing more furiously, if that was possible, she tugged the outfit back over her breasts.

His hands were surprisingly gentle as he carefully cut holes in the top of the outfit and threaded the eyepatch in to keep it from falling down again. Once he was done, he picked up his sniper rifle again, a weapon that Kohta would have probably given his left nut to possess. "Xander," he said simply, stubbing a thumb into his chest.

She nodded. "Zandero," she pronounced carefully, and he smiled and nodded. "Saeko," she introduced herself. "Where should we go now?" she asked, waving a hand at the station around her to hopefully convey her meaning. With a few hand gestures, he managed to imply that he had been heading the direction she came from, though on the inside part of the ring. "Sure, why not," she muttered, and stepped out in front of her.

To her surprise, he didn't try to stop her, which made her wonder if he could tell that she could kick his ass, or if his choice of a sniper rifle was indicative of a more cowardly personality. Trying to stop herself from doubting him too much, she turned her eyes to their path. They had gone back to where he had stood when he saved her when he said something to get her attention, pointing at a sign when she turned around. Frowning, she shrugged her shoulders, completely missing his meaning.

First he tried miming a plus sign, which didn't indicate why he'd find that interesting, then tried writing out a word in English that she also didn't get. Finally, he rubbed his nose for a minute, then mimed giving himself an injection. "Oh, a doctor? That sounds like a good idea!" Following his gesture, she moved up towards a smaller elevator, allowing him to push the button. "I hope you know what we're getting into," she said darkly, and cocked her shotgun at the doors as they rose.

When the doors opened, she nearly pulled the trigger on reflex and paranoia. The lobby had been the site of a bloodbath, the blood of all the alien species mingled to produce something horribly dark and gruesome. Numerous footprints had been ground into it before it fully dried, and were now little more than a bitter reminder of the cyborg takeover.

The room was empty for the moment, and they took opposite sides of the room, sweeping towards the back. Many of the windows had been shot out or blown apart, and the air currents blew the occasional gust of smoke in. The door on the back of the room had been jammed open with a stretcher, and the scanning system on the other side swept back and forth to absolutely no effect.

On the other side of the scanner was the first alien either of them had seen that wasn't either dead or "improved". He looked to be a lizard of some kind, and held a sniper rifle smaller than Xander's own model. He stared in undisguised shock at them, before gesturing quickly for them to join him, holding the rifle loosely in one hand.

The two humans looked at each other, Xander saying something in English, and Saeko shrugged. Taking the initiative, the one-eyed man strode through the scanner, ignoring the tones and English words broadcast, stopping a few feet away from the lizard-man. The two of them started conversing, and while it initially surprised her to hear them both speaking English, she listened a little more closely, realizing that the alien's English wasn't coming from his mouth but from something strapped to his wrist.

"How is it doing that translation while you speak?" she asked, then flushed slightly as both stopped to stare at her.

"My omni-tool, like most, is equipped to translate all major languages," the alien replied, and smiled at her surprise. "Your companion has related something of a surprising tale of his arrival on Citadel Station. You two don't speak the same dialect?"

She stared for a moment, then looked at Xander, who started laughing. "No, no we don't. Do you have one of those we can use to talk to each other?"

He nodded, then paused as he started to turn away. "Actually, I might have something better, if you're interested. They make translation modules small enough to be implanted. It won't help you talk, but it does let you understand. They're self-contained, so the AI that's taken control of the station can't hack them."

She shook her head violently. "No thank you, Mister Lizard. I'd rather take a wrist unit."

Ducking his head in a small bow, he turned towards one of the rooms. "As you wish. My name is Thane Krios. We'll have to do this fast, so that I can get you out of the hospital a different way. The cyborgs will be waiting at every floor that elevator connects to." Worried, they followed him into a patient room, and he dug through a small locker inside the door. "Here's one for each of you," and she thought it was somewhat odd hearing his voice in English, Japanese, and his native language all at the same time.

"Thank you, Krios-san," she said, calmly strapping it into place. "There's another way out?" she asked.

"Indeed, back here," he gestured towards an air vent in the ceiling. "You'll have to collapse down your weapons, but I'll lead you to another exit."

"Hold on a second," Xander said. "Why are you hanging around here? Are there more survivors?"

His face fell, and he shook his head sadly. "You are the first people I've seen in two days now. It's not clear when the AI took over, but I estimate between twelve and fourteen days. Somehow, it gained control over the Keepers that maintain the station, and began collecting people and turning them into cyborgs shortly after that."

"Keepers? You mean the smelly explodey green bugs?"

"Yes." Thane looked reassured by the language. "Some of them will be here shortly. I've been staying around the hospital and maintaining my own treatments as best I can." He smirked as Xander opened his mouth to ask another question. "It's not contagious, but it is terminal. I estimate I have a few more weeks at best, unless the AI can be stopped."

"Lead the way," Saeko said before Xander could ask another question. "We can talk more once we've reached relative safety." Without even bothering to nod, the alien stepped up onto the table, pulled the panel down, and carefully swung himself up into the oversized vent. With some trepidation, Saeko followed him, hearing Xander join them in the unlit shaft.


	9. Meetings: Adam and Blackjack

Adam listened to Harper's terse description of what she and Neville had done, hearing the Englishman's voice in the background, as well as an even fainter, rather pleasant, female voice he supposed was the supposed unicorn. "Soon as I can get to the Presidium," he replied. "Any idea which ward this unicorn is on?"

He waited a minute in silence, using his sniper rifle scope to scan the streets below. This floor was up above the atmosphere, but the rooftops were still accessible, and his oxygen filtration system was good enough to let him hold out for a few minutes in the near-vacuum outside. Not that he really wanted to do that again, but it seemed to confuse the cyborgs to no end, a result he wholly endorsed.

The last building contained another breached barricade, and he had traded in the shotgun for an assault rifle. Still not fully happy with lethally gunning down what were probably innocent people before they had chunks of their bodies replaced. Part of him was revolted every time he simply saw one of the human ones, their crude construction sharply at odds with his own rather sleek enhancements.

"Damn, I'm getting all wangsty up here," he muttered to himself. "Harper?" he queried.

"She doesn't know for sure where she's at, sorry," the English-accented voice came through. "But if you switch your omni-tool to Mode 27 you can talk with her."

He ducked back out into the hallway, jogging casually up the stairs towards the roof and pausing by the door. "What's an omni-tool?" he asked, before grabbing the green bug-thing that had been waiting at the top of the stairs and hurling it down the gap between the stairs, watching it twist and finally slam into the railing four stories down and explode.

"Uh, the glowy arm-computer things?" Harper responded. "How the heck are you talking to us without one?"

"Hold on a minute," he said, then flipped the door open, using the wash of atmosphere to boost his speed and launch himself thirty feet over to the next building. Moving to the side of the door, he hit that one to open as well, then ran and jumped to the next one in line, opened that one too, then went over the side of that building to a far shorter one, passing down into the air line below with a sudden rush of sound.

"I did tell you I worked for Sarif the _biotechnical firm_, didn't I?" he asked Harper, then crept up to the edge facing the street. Sure enough, cyborgs were slowly moving out of other buildings, moving to all three of the ones he'd opened. The person controlling them was getting smarter, but not by much, he thought.

"Yeah, and?" she replied.

He paused a moment before responding, very glad he could talk on his communications suite without actually having to talk. "Sorry, maybe I didn't explain. Biotechnical industries are responsible for cybernetic implants. Not like these guys, nothing so crude or ugly. I have a," he had to pause and think of what the old-school term for it was, "basically a cell phone wired into my brain."

There was several more minutes of silence, which he used to move to the ground behind the building, onto some kind of aircar loading dock, short out the security system, and move into what he thought was a clothing store … for something the size of a midget with the shape of a bowling ball on legs? "Aren't you worried that the AI controlling these things can hack into your brain?"

He actually snickered to himself as he browed through the racks, finding another two ammo cylinders behind the counter. "I've dealt with an AI before, though that one liked me. Short version: no, worst she can do is make like a telemarketer and spam my incoming lines." The street was clear for now, so he casually jumped through the shattered window and continued on his someone-confused path towards the Presidium.

"Why do you say the AI is a female?" Neville asked, and he heard a few brief gunshots through the line.

Adam paused to actually consider it, stopped in the middle of the street. "The other AI I dealt with had a female voice, avatar, and everything. Guess it was a bad assumption." As he stood there, the collection of bugs working to dismantle a barricade suddenly turned and moved off in another direction, their work half done. "That's weird. I'm going offline for a bit."

Cautiously, he jumped up to the low roof of a store with some alien sign, skirting the edge of the roof as he watched them lumber on their way. While jumping to the next building, he heard a sudden gun retort, and flattened himself against the rooftop. It was coming from somewhere up ahead of him, so he dropped back down to the street, trying to get a better read on the combat ahead before coming to their aid.

He retracted the assault rifle and pulled his sniper rifle back out, flattening against one corner of the building and scoping down the street. In the zoomed in view, he watched a cyborg get pieces of its head blown away, and skimmed sideways just enough to get a good range. The mystery person was holed up in an office building, or something like it, sniping out the front door. Calmly, he lined up his shot, blowing through two of the green bugs.

As some of them started to turn around, he took his next several shots, cutting down the ones heading his way first. By the time he ran out of shots and moved to reload, half the opposing cyborgs were down and so were all of the bugs. He tensed, jumping to the roof, and sprinted over to the next one before dropping down on the other side of the sniping survivor. Ducking around the corner, he snapped another cyborg through the spine, then one through the head, and just as he turned to butt-smash the last one, its neck blew through and it collapsed jerkily.

He swept the open square quickly, then took a few steps towards the doorway. He paused right in front of the door, taking in the bizarre sight before him, what appeared to be a half-cybernetic horse, rocked back on its hind legs, holding a sniper rifle of its own in mechanical forelegs in extendable finger-claw-things. Their poses were almost exactly mirrored, and as he slowly raised the sniper rifle, so did it. He carefully lined up his shot, and smiled grimly.

"I thought your horn would be bigger," he said quietly, and had the satisfaction of seeing the robotic eyes twitch slightly. "On three?" he asked, bracing his rifle carefully.

"Sure. Three," Blackjack said, and both of them fired almost in unison, blowing away two last Keepers as the bugs tried to sneak up on them. "I'm guessing you're Adam? Neville said something about you."

"Yeah." Slipping his rifle away under his jacket, he pulled the assault rifle back out and armed it. "I'm guessing you didn't mention that you're also part robot," he wisecracked. As he watched, her horn glowed softly, returning the sniper rifle to a set of saddlebags and pulling out one of the futuristic pistols he'd seen around. "Adam Jensen, from Detroit, on Earth."

She nodded, extending a forehoof, which he bent over to give a hand – hoof? – shake. "Blackjack, security mare of Stable 99, in Equestria." She looked him over briefly as they walked. "I don't want to sound rude, but you don't look much like a cyborg." In response, he lifted up his shirt and spread his coat open, showing the darkly gleaming metal and synthetics underneath. "Okay, point taken." Her gun bobbled slightly in the air next to her.

He considered it for a few moments, looking down a side street at the burned-out wreck of an airtruck. "Something wrong with cybernetics? It's something I actually have some experience in." He glanced at her, then up. Only a kilometer or so before they could reach the elevators.

Blackjack was silent for several minutes as they skirted around half-seen cyborgs and the sites of other former resistance. "The last two cybernetic ponies I met were both insane, in different ways." Her gun twitched as she stared down an alley for a moment, then fell back into step beside him. "Also, my friends think I'm not exactly bucking the trend," she added with her own fair share of dry wit.

"Fair enough," he said. "So what's the magical land of Equestria like? Everything all made of hugs and rainbows?" She snorted in a way that, after a moment of reflection, didn't remind him of a horse. "Yeah, Detroit neither." He paused at a corner. "Don't suppose your magic will let you look around corners?"

"Nope. Why?" She raised an eyebrow, and in response he pointed up at the ring of the Presidium up above them. "Ah. Afraid there'll be a whole swarm of crazy cyborgs waiting for us?"

"Just a little." He looked up, gauging the distance, and folded up his assault rifle. "Back in a second." Before she could answer, Adam launched himself up the wall, gripping the edge of the roof three stories up, and with a barely-heard whine of servos, lifted his eyes over the edge, then swung his body up and rolled onto the roof.

To his great surprise, the plaza before the elevator was empty of cyborgs, but the clear glass doors also showed quite clearly the elevator wasn't there. He dropped back off the roof, the unicorn watching him closely. "You can _fly_?" she asked jealously.

He shook his head with a small smirk. "No, I can fall slowly enough to not kill myself, that's all." He jerked his head towards the plaza. "The elevator's not there, but neither is the opposition."

"Waiting in the buildings around us?" she said softly. "That's what I'd expect, anyway." As she started to say something else, a soft chime came from the plaza, and frowning, they both sidled up to the edge of the building, bumping into each other as they tried to see what was going on.

To their surprise, the elevator had arrived, and four cyborgs showing battle damage were inside. Others were stepping outside of the buildings, just as they had both feared, and a quick count left them both feeling nervous about their ammunition supply. "I don't think we're going to get through that crowd," Blackjack said slowly. "Normally, I'd feel thrilled to lead a forward charge and tear them to pieces, but you're not quite as numerous as the backup I'm used to. No offense," she added the last hurriedly as she realized how it might sound.

"None taken," he said. They moved back down the alleyway for a moment and a sudden thought struck him. "Actually, I might. I'm not sure if I can fly, but drive, yeah. If we can fix one."

She looked up at him blankly. "Fix one what?"

He led her back to the main street they had just left, and pointed at the burned aircar. "I arrived here in a shop that fixes those things. There were three vehicles in there, mostly put together." He pointed back down the arm of the ward. "It's about twenty kilometers that way, though, and obviously I have no experience fixing these things myself."

Nodding, Blackjack started trotting off, forcing Adam to catch up to her this time. "Sounds like a plan to me," she said. "It's no Pegasus cab, but it'll do."

He snorted as he hefted the assault rifle again. "Pegasus are real in your world too? Sounds interesting."

"Oh yes, nothing like a group of pegasi in powered armor armed with grenade launchers and laser rifles to ruin your day," she said dryly. "Cyborgs ahead," her pistol barked out two shots, felling the lone opponent ahead of them.

"We'd better move then. How long can you keep up a high speed?" Adam asked, moving to a light jog and turning his own rifle onto a bug rising into a window, splattering it backwards into shelves of environmental suits.

"Longer than you, I bet!" Blackjack moved up to a near gallop, and both of them had the same grin on their faces as they raced for the garage.


	10. Movement: Harper and Neville

Halfway back to the embassy, Neville sagged against the side of a fairly intact aircar. "Whew. This is harder than I expected. I mean, I did just go through a war, but most of it wasn't quite this … protracted."

Harper sat down near him, watching the other direction. "This is going to sound weird, but how long was your day before you got here?"

He considered the question for a moment. "Um, it was about mid-afternoon, I think? And I spent most of the day helping to move pieces of incinerated trash. Then I've been here for something like eight hours now? Though I spent most of the first two hours searching through some storerooms for this." He activated his omni-tool briefly, checking the communication bands.

"I disappeared late at night, after getting into a fight to the death with an Egyptian vampire." He raised an eyebrow at that, and she grimaced. "Then I got thrown in here, and woke up in a closet with a salarian in the room with me."

Nodding sagely, Neville glanced around. "Um, which ones are those, again? The tiny lizard-like ones?"

"From what I've seen, they might be amphibious, but since I got a whole single minute of conversation with him, which didn't even include his name, I can't be sure." She gestured to her own omni-tool. "Last thing he did was change the language settings on this so at least I could use it." Her eyes went somewhere far away for a moment. "I'm hoping that when we figure out what's causing this, and stop it, that there's still some locals around. I want to know what his name was."

Soberly, the young wizard nodded. "You're the first non-cyborg person I've seen. Though I did get some mystery messages even before I got this thing." He levered himself to his feet, peering carefully over the car. "I think that group moved off. We should get there soon."

Returning to silence, they moved down the walkways, avoiding the cyborgs where they could. Another hour later and they finally reached near the embassy stairs, seeing from further away the sheer mass of cyborgs patrolling the area. "Well, that's less than helpful," Harper grumbled. "See, this? This is why I didn't want to use open communications with Adam and Blackjack. Hopefully they haven't already made it here."

Neville shrugged. "I don't suppose you found anything that's explosive? Ah well, just a thought." He studied the pattern of the patrols for several moments, counting under his breath and twitching his wand back and forth. "Actually, I'm sure I can get us up there to the room itself, but none of these guys is bunching up enough for me."

"That technology-exploding spell? It did seem to come in pretty handy." She looked around. "I can't guarantee that I can get us up there either. There's some paths in the recent occupied past, but if whoever's running this freak show put guards in the embassy itself, I don't think we can avoid them."

Neville looked around the area, and pointed to the broken bridge spanning the artificial lake. "How good are you with that pistol? We might be able to start sniping them from there."

They studied the other side of the Presidium, the air still hazy with smoke old and new. "I'm proficient – have to be, to carry concealed weapons in Seattle – but I'm no Navy SEAL." He gave her a blank look. "Um, I don't think I'm that good, even with my ability to manipulate time. Also, I can't see clearly enough to know what's on the other side."

"Right. Plan B – I didn't explore the inside well, but these things," he gestured at the building-slash-rooms that stretched up the wall of the Presidium, "should have some connections on the inside. We backtrack a little bit, and start exploring inside for another way in." Grimacing in displeasure at the idea, she nonetheless gestured for him to precede her back around the ring. "Plan C is we get on the comms, and try to come up with a code for where to meet up with two people we've never met before on a station none of us has even heard of and probably isn't even in our universe."

"Okay, okay, I get the point," Harper grumbled. "I just don't like the possibility of getting flanked inside a building like this." She sighed. "If we're going to signal, then let's do it now, rather than lead them to the next spot. These things aren't terribly fast." She waited for him to gesture assent and take up a guardian position before triggering her tool. "Adam, Blackjack, the embassy is surrounded by cyborgs. Neville and I are ok, but we're going to look for a safer meeting place somewhere else on the Presidium."

They waited a moment, and a double squelch came back. "That's Adam, so he got it."

A moment later, a completely different voice broke in on their channel. "Copy that, music lady, Rubber Duck will be there soon as possible," and the two magicians looked at each other in wild confusion. "Keep an ear out for gunfire and cleavage." A slap accompanied the last word before the transmission cut off.

"What the bloody hell was that?" Neville asked, before turning his wand towards the first group of approaching cyborgs, causing them to seize up for a few seconds as they turned to run.

"No idea!" Harper replied, firing a trio of shots behind them as they jinked around a burned-out aircar. "Find out later!"

"I mean, how do you listen for cleavage?" he clarified, whipping his wand at a salarian cyborg that exited from the storage area he had acquired his tool from, and slashing through everything on its neck but a trio of cables. The cyborg jerked around spasmodically for several moments, sending wild shots towards the bridge walkway above them before the dangling weight pulled the cables free of the skull. "It's just nonsensical!"

"Less talking, more running," she scolded as quietly as possible, and pointed at a visible balcony three or four stories above them. "Apparate us up there, quick!" He grabbed her by the elbow, and they blinked out of sight in a rush of displaced air.

Cautiously, they watched over the edge of the balcony as the cyborgs chasing them came to the exact spot they vanished from, then milled around aimlessly. "I'm very glad these things don't understand teleportation," Harper added. They scanned the room, obviously an apartment for someone fairly wealthy, and moved to check all of the exits. After moving a table, and using some clothing to dangle several metallic art pieces as an alarm, they both stopped, looking at the single large bed. "We can take turns," Harper said.

Neville smirked a little bit. "I am a gentleman, and while you might be single, I am very much in love with my Luna, and look forward to returning to her as soon as we figure this all out." Kicking off his shoes, he lay down on one side of the bed. "Six hours enough, you think?"

Rolling her eyes, she moved to the other side of the bed, kicking off her own shoes. "I'm spoken for too, by my boyfriend and my pet ferret." He snorted in amusement at that. "Sure, you laugh, but I'd wager that Chaos would make short work of these cyborgs. Skitter up a few and chew some sensitive electronics to pieces, then Quinton would turn around and start dismantling everything. Probably build himself a lightning cannon or a portal gun or something equally useful."

Trading a few other friendly comments about their respective lovers, they drifted off to sleep. Four hours later, the sound of a massive crash outside woke them both in a momentary panic. "What the hell?" Harper said rhetorically, her gun already tracking the doorway as she slipped her sneakers back on.

"It came from outside," Neville said, and a quick glance from the bedroom door confirmed that their barricade and alarm was still intact. Creeping up to the balcony railing, they stared down the hundred yards towards the embassy entrance, where a freshly-crashed aircar had just exploded, littering the area with several dozen cyborg pieces, in both moving and inanimate varieties. "Somebody knows how to make an entrance," he added.

"I'm just hoping they weren't in it when they crashed," she started, before a squelch from their omni-tools interrupted. She gave a quick triple-squelch in return, hoping he'd interpret it as _Are you okay? _like she intended. Unfortunately, while Quinton probably knew Morse code, she couldn't remember much beyond an SOS.

"Very creepy cyborg of an utterly different configuration on that balcony over there," Neville said, and she followed his pointing wand across the way. What might have been a small horse was barely visible on one of the balconies on the other side of the lake. "I might be able to Apparate us that far, but I can't see well enough to be sure."

"I don't suppose you know any spells that duplicate a good set of binoculars, do you?" She squinted into the haze as well, spotting a humanoid figure near the horse-like one. Of course, they might just be seeing another alien species they hadn't encountered yet. Most of them had been one of four races, true, but there had been the rare giant lizard or space ape ones too.

"It looks like a horse, right?" he said slowly, and she raised an eyebrow for him to continue. "Unicorns look like horses. I could signal them with just light, if you think it's safe."

"Can you control the timing enough to do an SOS? Three short, three long, three short," she clarified. Really, didn't these wizards know anything about the modern world? Taking a deep breath, he straightened his arm, sighting down the wand, and sent flickering pulses of gold light out as she'd indicated. At the first light, both humanoid and horse had thrown themselves to cover, but on the second repetition, the man stood up, and surrounded one hand in a corona of crackling electricity, gesturing towards ground level, then away from the embassy.

A moment later, her omni-tool popped on as the gesture repeated it. "You need help?" Blackjack's voice came over, "Or were you just getting our attention?" Neville grinned, changing the light gestures, circling the two smoke-wreathed figures, then executing a similar motion to Adam's. "Roger," the unicorn replied, and they cut off communication.

"Guess we'd better get moving," Harper said, rising to her feet and waving one arm widely just in case. A faint glow came from the other balcony as the two faded from sight, presumably inside the building. "Want to take us back down?"

Apparating back to street level, they ducked quickly into the shelter of a ruined storefront, then crept up the street. The next bridge was still intact, mostly, so they should be able to meet up there.


	11. Movement: Saeko and Xander

After what seemed like a nearly interminable interval, Krios-sans voice came from just ahead of her. "The passage slopes down sharply. Count to five, then follow me. Keep your weapons compact." With a whisper of fabric and a slight pull in the air, he was gone, and Saeko tentatively felt her way forward to the edge. Gracefully, she turned herself around, dropped her feet over the edge, and took a deep breath before pushing off.

It felt like a really long slide, like one she vaguely remembered in a park near Yokohama she'd visited on a family trip. Three, maybe four seconds, and her feet hit the bottom unexpectedly. She rolled forward, clutching the shotgun to her chest as she heard one of her ammo loads go bouncing off the wall near her. Thane's omni-tool lit up the passage momentarily for her to grab it and get out of the way, then Xander came crashing down behind her. "Awesome," he whispered quietly.

Another twenty minutes of crawling, interrupted once by a ladder and once by a narrow gap they jumped by the lights on their tools, before they exited in what looked like a waiting room. "We should be safe here for a short while, at least. Perhaps you could now fill me in on how you arrived," the assassin said to Saeko.

Taking seats on a nearby couch, she laid it all out as quickly as possible. Smiling, he gestured to her omni-tool. "May I?" he saked, and reluctantly, she removed it and handed it to him. He tinkered with it for several minutes, then handed it back. "Move your hand like so," he gestured, holding out his left hand as though wielding a blade himself.

To her surprise, when he did so, a glowing blade appeared from the omni-tool, narrow and squat and viciously jagged. "You set up mine to do that?" she asked, but he merely smiled enigmatically. With a minor sense of misgiving, she triggered her own. Unlike Thane's own orange blade, hers was a shade closer to dusky rose, and was long and narrow – not a katana, but closer to a wakizashi blade. Her grin was instant and hungry. "Now _this_ I can use!" Gushing over the blade as it flickered and was re-formed, she stopped to give him a deep bow. "Arigato, Krios-san," she said.

"Hey, I didn't even need the translation to understand that one," Xander piped in. "Though, no offense, it just sounds _weird_ to call him 'Mr. Krios', like he's a high school teacher." The drell looked at him in mystification, the Japanese teen in amusement. "My experience in fighting vampires and demons will probably be a little less helpful beyond knowing how to aim."

"To start with, we should find you a better firearm," Thane said, and the two humans exchanged blank looks. "If you fire that one, you'll shatter every bone in your shoulder."

Hefting the gun, he pulled on his t-shirt enough to expose the bruise that he received from his first poor firing position. "Funny, it didn't do that the last half dozen shots I did," he deadpanned. Taking in the obvious surprise, he grinned again. "What, you think I got this," he gestured at the still-bare eye socket, "by accident? I spent the last seven _years_ fighting off things that could lift cars and outrun bicycles."

Nodding, Thane leaned back against the cushions, starting to gasp for breath. The two humans looked at each other anxiously, unsure of what they could do to help. "Oxygen canister," he gasped out, pointing with a shaking arm, "hidden … plant," and collapsed onto one side, his breaths coming fast and quick as though trying to hyperventilate.

Saeko leaped over the couch, closer to it than Xander, and triggering her blade, slashed the slowly-dying shrub in half, scattering branches and dry leaves everywhere. A small metal canister glinted in the wreckage, and picking it up in her other hand, she whirled and tossed it underhand to Xander, who popped up and caught it effortlessly. Fiddling with it, he finally opened the bottle and placed the hissing nozzle in front of Thane's mouth.

It took a few minutes, which Saeko used to quickly scout out the exits. One winding hallway led back out to the Presidium, and the other led to a stairway going up. She considered tipping over a plant near it to provide an alarm, but on the off chance they needed to retreat in that direction, she held off. Eventually, the drell's breathing eased back to more normal levels, and with some difficulty, he sat up and took the nearly-empty canister in one shaking hand. "Thank you."

Xander nodded, patting him lightly on one shoulder. "What are friends for?" he asked, then gestured around. "What was this place?"

"A medical clinic for volus. One of the races here." Smiling thinly, he inhaled the last from the canister before shoving it between the couch cushions, and proceeded to give them a quick run-down of all the alien species to be found on the Citadel. "I assume that the volus high-density suits is why I have not seen any of them turned into cyborgs. They were not numerous, either, but even the batarians have turned up with improved parts."

Before he could talk more, a message alert popped up on their omni-tools, and Xander quickly activated it. They only missed the first two words. "Where's this embassy?" Saeko queried.

"There are several. But the human, volus, and elcor embassies are a short distance away, opposite ud on the outside of the ring," Thane pulled up a local map on his own, marking their location. "They sounded quite close."

Grinning, Xander replied with obvious gusto, and when the translation made an obvious reference to her breasts, Saeko slapped him. "Ow, I deserved that, I'll treasure it," he wise-cracked, holding one hand to his cheek.

Thane was up, moving more rapidly now. "We have to move. The cyborgs can track transmissions. It's why I didn't respond to any of those four during the last day they have been online." He started to move back towards the tunnels, only to stop dead, shaking.

Crawling out of it was another drell, they thought, only to quickly catch sight of the cybernetic parts that had replaced almost the entire left side of his body. The new one was younger, and his clothing was almost an exact match for Thane's. "No. Please, Kalahira, protect his soul," he whispered, then shouted at the humans over his shoulder, "Run! Save yourselves!"

The mocking, stuttering voice that echoed from the cyborg was both female and, to Xander, somewhat reminiscent of Glorificus. "You will be _upgraded_, just as your progeny was," it taunted the assassin, and that moment before striking was all Xander needed to unpack the Widow and let off a perfectly-aimed shot, taking the cyborg clean through the artificial optic sensor, spinning it around heavily as most of the synthetic parts on the head sheared off.

"We have to get out of here _now_," Saeko said, but Thane shook his head, moving over to kneel next to the body. "They're going to catch us in here if we don't move!" she said, somewhat shrilly, her right hand nervously triggering and vanishing her blade over and over.

"You two go," he said heavily, "meet up with the others, and try to shut down the AI. I," he paused again, his voice thick with grief, "I must bury my son."

She started to argue with him, but Xander grabbed her with his off hand, his other quite capably pointing the sniper rifle at the exit to the Presidium. "We can't help him with this," he said simply, and pulled her towards the stairs in the back. "We need to find another exit out of here," he said, calmly raising the rifle and blowing away another cyborg without even using the scope. "But we need to make enough noise to lead them off, first."

Pulling up her omni-tool, Saeko switched her communications to a random channel that said _No receivers within range_, and as they took the stairs two at a time, she spat angrily into it. "I don't know who programmed you, or how you got into the systems of this space station. I'm not even very good with electronics. But I swear, if it kills me, _I will end you_."

Grinning at her, Xander pirouetted on one foot, slamming the butt of his rifle into a salarian-cyborg hard enough to snap its neck backwards at a greater-than-ninety-degree angle. "They're coming from in here, must be a way out." She stepped past him, her sword flickering in and out as she multiplied three cyborgs into ten pieces. Switching his gaze rapidly between two doors, he pointed at the one on the left. "That one."

They thudded through it, Saeko in the lead, her red blade disappointingly unstained with the blood of her enemies.

Below them, in the waiting room, Thane had arranged the body of Kolyat, and whispered his prayers under his breath. A sudden sharp pain ripped through him, snapping the bottom two ribs on one side of his rib cage, and he gasped, spattering blood all over his son's body. Whose organic eye was now open, and watching him, the cold gaze of the AI behind it. "You **will** be upgraded," it said, and he slumped sideways, his body still struggling to breathe.

They had stopped in a well-stocked bedroom two more floors above the waiting room, and some distance off to the side. They took turns napping, unwilling to trust any kind of alarm system. When the giant explosion woke Saeko, she whirled off the elcor bed, her sword-blade already flickering into being before she registered Xander crouching behind the wall of the balcony. "What happened?"

He glanced briefly at her, and gestured for her to join him. "If I read the map right, then that," he pointed at the giant mess of burning cyborg parts, "was the entrance to the embassies. More importantly," he turned and pointed further in the direction they had been moving, "two people jumped out of that flying car just before it took an explosive nose-dive onto those gearheads."

Her omni-tool took a moment to translate the last word. "They don't have gears," she protested briefly, then rose slightly above the edge of the balcony to look further down. "If we can jump up there, we should be able to take that shopping district over to where they landed, right?"

Xander tried fiddling with the map on his omni-tool, then looked up where she meant. "Theoretically, yeah," he drawled, "but that's also nearly ten feet up and five over. I can't jump that high. Maybe I could toss you, but then how would I reach it?"

She crept back into the bedroom, pulling the heavy fabric off the bed and using her sword to cut it into long strips. "Oh, right, reverse jail break. I should have thought of that." He took the strips as she cut them, tying them into a rough rope and adding more knots along the length. "How should I help you get up there?"

They moved back out to the balcony, but the cyborgs moving were all four stories below them, and like most organics, they didn't bother to look up either. "Is your back in good shape? I would rather use you as a springboard, kick off the wall, and then go over the balcony railing above us." He considered the angles, then knelt down right at the edge of the balcony. "Ready?" She waited for his nod, bounced twice on her toes, and sprinted the three steps to him.

Her leap was graceful, springing off his back with her left foot, the wall with her right, then clearing the railing like it was a high jump competition, landing in a crouch as she pulled out her shotgun. Remarkably, neither cyborgs nor Keepers were in sight, and she turned around just in time to get hit in the face with the end of their makeshift rope. She tied it off tightly, glaring at Xander the whole time. Bracing himself, he leapt up from the railing, scaling the rope in seconds like a seasoned soldier. "Impressive, Harris-san," she said.

"Yeah, I still remember that from one Halloween," he replied, which made absolutely no sense to the swordswoman. He glanced around at the café tables, and followed the winding walkway with his eyes. "Let's stay out of the stores if we can?" She nodded agreement, and they moved out.


	12. Movement: Adam and Blackjack

Twenty kilometers later, Adam pulled a textbook baseball slide under the half-open door, striking a blue cyborg right in the ankle. He boosted back up with one hand, his arm blade coming out from the other and cleanly beheading it on the way up. "Showoff," Blackjack said from inside, panting heavily. "You think we can take a break now?" She popped something small and shiny into her mouth, crunching.

"Was that an emerald?" he asked, pulling his HUD over his sight long enough to check his vitals. After a moment's consideration, he pulled out another cyber bar and started chewing himself. "How do you eat a gemstone?"

"They're limey goodness," she mumbled around it. "I prefer jade, really, they're minty fresh." She swallowed it down, then levitated a bent metal railing section out of her saddlebags. "Have to repair myself somehow," she added, taking a bite off one end. He watched her, completely bemused at the fact he was watching a _cyborg unicorn_ eat a metal _bar_ for lunch, then shook his head and turned towards the office.

"Can you pop open the doors," he called to her as he started shuffling through the computer system, "and try starting them up?" Let's see, three vehicles, two private aircars and a medical delivery truck. _Medical?_ He thought quickly, and stepped back out. The truck said it was waiting on an exterior body panel, which he guessed was why the rear thrusters were exposed to the air.

Blackjack was extricating herself from what was probably supposed to be a sports model. "No good, this one is missing something on the control panel."

He moved over to the truck, pulling open the front door and peering inside. "Holy smokes," he said slowly, and a moment later grunted as Blackjack jumped up onto his back to look inside as well. The entire back of the truck was filled with bright red canisters, labeled in numerous languages, but Adam could recognize English and Chinese: _Oxygen tanks. Keep away from heat sources_. He stepped back, and the unicorn dropped to stand next to him. "You have any idea what'll happen if we get shot up in this thing?" he said.

She considered it for a moment, then started grinning, an expression that Adam found looked incredibly maniacal and even more worrying. "Please tell me you're not thinking that."

"What, we drive this thing near the overrun embassy, aim it at a giant crowd of cyborgs, and jump out?" she responded with faux innocence. "You make it sound like you've never thrown a car at someone before."

"I haven't," he said dryly. "I tended to stick to dumpsters, or just punching them through a wall."

She considered that for a moment. "Okay, touché, well done. Still, think of it – not only do we take out a big group of them, it'll give Neville and Harper a chance to find us before we all get swamped. Then we can figure out how to get out of here." She looked back out the half-open door. "Maybe see if there's any other survivors like Kirrahe who haven't been blown up yet."

He stepped up into the driver seat, familiarizing himself with the controls. _Vertical thrust, forward speed, bank left/right,_ he tagged them mentally, then tried turning on what looked like a digital display. "Please input destination," a pleasant female voice said.

"It comes with auto-pilot, at least. Since I don't have any knowledge of how to drive this thing from here, up through the vacuum of space between the wards," he saw her gulp heavily at that, "and then into the Presidium, which looks to be a sealed ring."

"How do you know where the embassy is, then?" she asked, trotting around to the passenger side, standing on her hind legs just to reach the door handle and get it open.

"Harper sent me a map." He punched in the human embassy, and since the engine was still off, the vehicle came up with a couple of alerts like _Doors Open_ and _Drive Core Offline_ and _Exterior Panels Missing_. "Had we been able to get up the elevator, we'd only be a hundred, hundred fifty meters away from the embassy." Looking over, he saw her eyeing the tangled seatbelts warily. "I think we can skip the safety regulations just this once."

Nodding, she looked out the windshield, quickly figuring out the windows didn't open, and shoving open her door to levitate her two pistols over the door and blow away the Keeper entering after them. "Time's up. We need to move before they swamp us again."

Sighing, he stepped out, meeting a ducking cyborg with a solid boot to the nose, then crouched down to brace his hands on the door. He had a brief moment of _Oh shit_ before he shoved up on the door and bolted back for the safety of the cab.

The street outside held at least three dozen cyborgs, and close to that many Keepers. Without even bothering to close his door, Adam mashed the startup button, slipped it into gear, and gunned it out the door and up. The gravity field slammed many of their opponents to the ground, others opening fire as they rapidly swept out of range.

Picking herself up from the foot panel under the dashboard, Blackjack clambered back onto the seat. "Mind warning me next time?" she said.

"Nah, I figured you'd notice me running for my life and come to the appropriate conclusion," he said, tapping the auto-pilot. It was still complaining about the exterior panel missing, but he was above the atmosphere line and it hadn't done anything bad yet.

"Time to destination, seven minutes," the auto-pilot chimed in, and they were treated to the sight of the station from inside the arms. The wards rose around them like giant armored slabs, and in the darkness they could see the outline of several ships, floating aimlessly in the purple clouds of the nebula.

"What happened to those guys, you think?" Blackjack asked, her voice small and quiet.

Adam studied the ships closely as they zipped by closer to the Presidium ring. "I don't know," he finally said, "But it looks like someone took the artillery version of these," patting his assault rifle, "and denied them permission to leave." They neared the ring, passing up above the rim towards the inside. Several vehicle-sized doors could be seen, and the auto-pilot banked them towards one off to the right of their ward.

"Ready for this?" Blackjack asked, shoving her pistols back into her saddlebags.

"Sure. You learn how to fly yet?" he asked. At her wide-eyed stare, he smiled. "Did you forget we're in an _air_ car? I'm not approaching the place at ground level." They were already in the Presidium, and he had disabled the auto-pilot, one hand on the small steering wheel and the other manipulating the throttles.

"Wait, no, I changed my mind, this is a really really bad ideaaaaa!" The last word turned into a shriek, as Adam kicked the driver's door off, grabbed Blackjack by the forelegs, and threw himself out of the car. For a brief moment, he was worried that his landing enhancement had decided to blue-screen, then it kicked in, and they landed on a balcony, remarkably devoid of any cyborgs. The explosion of the car striking the sidewalk at two hundred kph washed over them a moment later, bringing with it a couple of small cyborg and organic pieces.

"Oh, Celestia, it's in my mane!" she complained, shaking her head violently. Adam reached over, grabbing her by the muzzle to pluck the offending metallic finger off her and flicking it over the railing. "I can't believe we're actually alive." She paused to consider it. "Now I know how P-21 feels on a regular basis. Thanks, Doctor Jensen. How much do I owe you for the therapy session?" Moving closer to the railing, she stood up, leaning her forehooves against the bar to try and peer down through the smoke.

Adam heard the triple squelch through both his communicator and Blackjack's leg, as she looked down at it quizzically. "That's Harper. Harder to track a burst like that." He sent back a squelch of his own, trying to scan the area around them for survivors. The burst of gold light shooting just above his head sent him to the floor in a momentary panic. "And apparently they've learned that trick!" he said, both of them sitting with their backs against the balcony wall.

After the second repetition, though, he recognized the pattern, and started chuckling. "An SOS? Never mind, that must be Harper."

"What's an SOS?" the unicorn asked curiously.

"It's a signal for help. It's been universal for, I dunno, something like two centuries." He knelt, peering back over the balcony. "Going to mark us both out for the cyborgs, though."

As he watched, Blackjack pulled open a panel on her left foreleg, manipulating what looked like an arm computer designed by an Art Deco committee. He listened as she traded conversation with Harper and Neville, pumping power into his hand and motioning down the Presidium away from the embassy. Down below them was a wrecked bridge, and where there was one, there would be more.

The light beam changed, mirroring his own movement, and he turned to his companion. "Let's get moving. We'll stick to the balconies until we either hit a group we can't handle, or see an intact bridge." She nodded, moving to the side of the balcony. Covering each other, they leapt from balcony to balcony, trampling over drying or burnt plants and through the remains of bedrooms, offices, and stores, only ever pausing briefly to pick up ammo canisters.

Before too long, they were looking down at a mostly intact bridge, a couple of burned aircars making a barricade in the center. Below them were not two, but _four_ people, two pairs of a man and a woman each, eying each other suspiciously. "Great," Adam said. "Now which side do we back up?"

"Should we back up either? We've got the high ground." Blackjack had her own sniper rifle out, scanning the four below. "Ick, that guy is missing an eye!"

He looked at her dispassionately. "Creepy cyborgs put together like a bad school art program don't squick you out, but a healthy guy missing an eye is bad?" He sighed. "Let's go down there and make our entrance. If you insist, I think we can come in as a third side, make it a real nice Mexican standoff."

Blackjack, still spying through the sniper rifle scope, wasn't paying attention to his movements. "What's a Mexicaaaah don't DO THIS AGAIN!" she shrieked as he picked her up and calmly jumped over the railing of a fifth story balcony.


	13. Unification

_Author's Note: Yes, it's finally time for all the heroes to meet up, combine forces, and begin kicking ass. No, they still don't know what they're up against as a Big Bad. But that time is coming quickly. Besides, what better chapter for unification than unlucky 13?_

* * *

Harper and Neville ran quickly through the building, to the next major stairway and down to the street level, pistols and wand clearing out cyborgs, using the Grey to vanish through locked doors and one inconvenient wall. They had passed an intact bridge, and knew how far it was, and the cyborgs massing were mostly behind them, shuffling through the building to close on the exploded aircar. Still, their own shots would draw attention soon enough.

Xander and Saeko ran along the exposed balcony walkways up above, until she gestured with her blade towards the intact bridge below them. Almost as though practiced, they dropped down one balcony at a time in a zig-zag fashion, taking advantage of the unique station architecture. Mostly, Saeko dropped first, with Xander covering her from above, though he took the last drop to street level first.

The four people closed on the end of the bridge at the same time, the wizard and Greywalker coming across the bridge as the two "normal" humans came up from one side. Everyone immediately raised weapons, pointing at each other warily. "So, are you Adam, or Neville?" Xander asked quietly, the barrel of his Widow barely above the height of Saeko's shoulder.

"I guess that makes you the mysterious 'Rubber Duck," Harper said. Continuing to eye each other warily, she moved up next to Neville. "I suppose we can call a truce for the moment?"

Before either of them could respond, a sudden shriek came from above them, and everyone raised their weapons as a man with implanted sunglasses holding a pony-sized cyborg dropped to the ground in a wash of light. "Damn it, Adam, don't _do_ that!" Blackjack complained.

"Holy shit, I can die happy now," Xander said. "A cyborg My Little Pony."

"I'm a _unicorn_!" she spat, levitating out two pistols. "Now what's going on here? Everyone better start rattling off their names, or I'm going to start shooting people's hooves off!"

"We don't have hooves," Saeko protested quietly, but allowed her blade to vanish.

"Don't test me," she growled back. "Who is everypony?"

"I had no idea unicorns were so … violent," Harper said, lowering her pistol. "I'm Harper, this is Neville," she gestured to the two newest, "and obviously you two are Adam and Blackjack. Nice tattoo," she gestured to the playing cards visible on the unicorn's flank.

"I'm Xander Harris, construction foreman, vampire slayer, and world saver." He also lowered his sniper rifle. "This is Saeko."

"Saeko Busujima," she said, glaring briefly at Xander. "We have had little opportunity to talk, but neither of us is native to this space station. Are any of you?"

Adam stepped into the middle of the group, hands up placatingly. "None of us is native here, I think. But first, we need to find somewhere safe enough and overlooked enough to talk and try to figure out what's going on. It's not going to take the cyborgs long to run into us again, and they all communicate somehow." He pulled out his assault rifle, unfolding it as he did. "I'm guessing Saeko prefers melee combat, and everyone else has decent ranged attacks?"

Neville raised his wand. "Short range, but yes. I can disable the cyborgs, but I can explode the bugs."

Harper motioned to continue their motion away from the embassy. "I can get us into a locked room without setting off any alarms, but it might take a while. Do we stay out here, or go inside the rooms now?"

There was a moment of group indecision before Blackjack shook her head. "One-eye here has a sniper rifle, so do Adam and I, though our ammo is a little more limited. Let's stay out here for a little while."

In eerie unison, all four omni-tools lit up at once. "On Kithoi Ward, the Central Archives are being converted into an additional server for the AI controlling the Citadel. Destroy it, and you will limit the cyborg's ability to respond in unison."

Everyone froze as the obviously disguised male voice spoke. "Creepy voices activating on their own. Gee, _that's_ not creepy at _all_," Xander said, motioning to Saeko to take the lead.

Neville frowned, moving to take the inside flank as they all started trotting away from the embassy. "When I first arrived here, no more than a handful of minutes, _someone_ sent a message to a desk device in the embassy. It also mentioned an AI in charge of the station being behind the Keepers. The bugs," he shuddered.

Harper also chimed in. "When I was in the grey, someone short and furry grabbed me and steered me to safety. That shouldn't be _possible_."

"What's the grey?" Saeko asked, flexing her hands. "You keep mentioning it."

Adam growled. "Everyone, _shut up_. These things are capable of _hearing_ us, and if we're listening to each other, we're not focusing on avoiding them!"

Chastened, everyone did shut up as they moved down another hundred yards, before finally ducking inside an entrance to what looked like a residential block of apartments. They went swiftly up four flights, moving in pairs, before stopping near a door to a larger unit. "Ready?" Harper asked, grabbing Neville in one hand and Saeko in the other.

Without actually waiting for a response, she thrust them both into the Grey and through the door, the other three watching as her entire body rippled and turned transparently misty along with the other two before sliding back into the real world. "You have any idea just how scary that looks?" Blackjack asked rhetorically, even as she moved up next to the door for her turn, getting shoved through with Xander.

"That is a neat party trick," Adam said.

"You have _no_ idea," she replied, grabbing him by the arm and pulling them both through the door. The other four had already fanned out, and the apartment was clear of anything but dust and memories. "So, let's pull up some chairs, and a cushion for Blackjack, and lay out the important stuff."

Slowly, they gathered around, after Xander raided the cupboard and brought back several things that looked like energy bars and bottled water. "I'll go first," Adam said. "My name is Adam Jensen, I was the head of security for Sarif Industries, a biotechnology firm. When I disappeared, it was the year 2027. Cybernetic enhancements, like mine, are just becoming common and affordable enough to be voluntary."

Xander held up a hand. "Wait. You're a cyborg too? How do we know you're not going to go off the deep end and join the horde down below?" Neville nodded along with him.

Signing, he gestured to his head. "My brain was almost completely unenhanced. Aside from a memory module, and communications, the AI can't access my brain. Even then, they aren't connected to the rest of my enhancements, so the worst it can do is spam me."

Harper cleared her throat. "I'm Harper Blaine, private investigator from Seattle. When I died, it was the year 2007."

"Wait, _died_?" Xander asked. "You _died_ and this is your afterlife?"

"I had just died too," Blackjack said.

"I should have," Adam rumbled, "but instead of pushing the lovely big red self-destruct button, somehow I was pushing a light switch here."

Everyone turned to look at Neville and Saeko expectantly. "Not me," Neville said. "I fixed a magic mirror to end up here."

The Japanese teen shrugged. "I passed out on the beach with my friends. Aren't we off track now?"

Harper held up a hand as she ordered her thoughts again. "I'm a Greywalker. What I did to put everyone through the door was a small measure of what that means. I can step into, and interact with, the past, and this station has _mountain ranges_ of past. I can't be sure, but it's been here for _hundreds of millions_ of years." Everyone considered that in silence for a moment before Neville cleared his throat. "Neville and I talked about it a little bit, but there's another worrying factor. The last five definite solid layers are spaced almost evenly at fifty thousand years apart. Past that it's a little more murky, but it looks like the same separation."

"So," Xander said slowly, "what, every fifty thousand years, something of epicly galaxy-shaking proportions happens, and we all just _happen _to show up for this one?"

"Sounds like," Adam said darkly.

"I hate stuff like this," Blackjack said. "Ancient conspiracies, or whatever. I had enough of that back home."

Saeko smiled and waved a hand in her direction. "I think you just volunteered to be next," she said.

Frowning, the unicorn sighed, slumping back on the cushion she sat on. "Obviously, my name is Blackjack, like you couldn't tell that from my cutie mark," Xander choked back a laugh as Blackjack glared at him. "I was born and raised in Stable 99, one of the few surviving places after the war with the zebras destroyed Equestria two hundred years ago." She glanced around at everyone else. "I don't think my world has anything close to humanity, so what year I came from doesn't really matter, right?"

"I suppose not," Adam said.

"I'm a unicorn, which means I'm supposed to be good with magic, but aside from levitation, I've never been much good at it," she confessed. "I do have a few spells, mostly my magic bullet, and I'm a _really_ good shot." She did consider telling them about her PipBuck, but given all of the problems she'd had back in Hoofington because of the damn thing, it was probably better not to mention it.

Which, naturally, was when Adam spoke up. "So how'd you end up a cyborg? With a nifty computer in your, uh, leg?"

She sighed. "Well, I got nailed to a floor by a bunch of raiders." The expressions of horror (except Xander, who looked ready to kill someone barehanded) on everyone's faces, especially Saeko's, reassured her that these were good people at heart. "My friends rescued me, and thanks to some favors I had owed, another cyborg gave me her parts. And turned herself into a brain-in-a-jar."

Neville frowned at that one. "What good would that do? Why not build new parts?"

"She couldn't. None of the factories capable of making them survived the war." She shrugged. "The computer is a PipBuck, and it's fairly standard for anyone in a Stable, they just built it in. It helps me organize my saddlebags and apply healing potions and works like those glowy things to communicate."

Neville nodded. "Guess it's my turn then. I'm Neville Longbottom, auror in training. That's kind of the wizard equivalent of a 'policeman', if I'm remembering the Muggle word correctly. Muggles are non-magic folk, like most of you. I graduated from Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry last year. There was sort of a war against an evil wizard named Voldemort, and I and my friends were right there helping fight against him. My best friend Harry was the one who killed him, though I helped."

Adam gestured to the wand. "So that thing's not just for show?"

"Nope. It works against the cyborgs, kind of. I know a sort of anti-technology spell, thanks to my friend being pen pals with some American wizard, but it doesn't last very long." He slipped the wand into the back pocket of his slacks. "I'd demonstrate, but I don't want to tip off the AI where we are."

"Good point," Xander said. "So, I'm Xander, and I'm from what used to be Sunnydale, California. Right now, it's probably a giant hole in the ground." He took a deep breath. "It was 2004 when it happened. My sophomore year, a new girl moved to town, named Buffy. She was the Slayer, one girl chosen from all in the world to stand against the evil things like vampires and demons."

Harper raised an eyebrow. "Vampires are that bad? I've met a few that can be worked with."

The two stared at each other for a moment. "Ok, that right there tells me that while our worlds might be similar, they're _not_ the same. Vampires in my world go insta-dusty when you stake them, and unless you interrupt them, they _always_ kill when they feed. Demons come in all kinds, some of them aren't too bad. We had just finished facing down the very First Evil." The capitals in the name came through clearly. "Willow, my best friend since elementary school, did some super mojo, and turned every potential girl into a full-fledged Slayer."

"So did you win?" Blackjack asked eagerly.

He sighed, resting his head in his hands, covering his eyes. "I don't know," he said. "I think so, but … Buffy might have died, Spike did, and I think Anya, my ex-fiancé, did too."

Silence reigned for a moment, and Saeko nervously cleared her throat. "As the only one left, it's my turn now. Obviously, I'm from Japan," she gestured to her omni-tool, "and we'd have trouble talking without these. A couple of days ago, the dead started rising, feeding on the living, and turning anyone bitten into one of Them. My friends and I escaped from our high school before it was overrun, and were trying to track down our families and find somewhere safe.

"The last thing I remember, we had taken a yacht to a small island off the southern coast of Honshu. I don't know what its name was. But it was clear of Them," she paused as Xander interrupted her.

"Zombies?"

"_Them_," she emphasized. "So we had changed into swim suits and were having a picnic barbeque on the beach. I fell asleep there, and woke up here." She looked around at everyone else. "So, Xander and I met one native, a lizard-person called a 'drell.' I think … he's dead now. One of the cyborgs we fought was his son."

Harper nodded. "I woke up in a closet with a salarian outside in the room. I didn't even get his name before he was killed, but he gave me the gun and the omni-tool."

Neville and Adam both shook their heads. "I met two, briefly," Blackjack said, "a human like you guys, and a salarian. They were together, but one of the big gorilla-looking ones blew me off a walkway with a rocket launcher. I don't know if they're alive or not."

"So," Adam said, taking charge for the moment. "There's six of us definitely still alive, with an unknown but probably shrinking number of local survivors. _Something_ brought us here. The question is, is our mysterious voice that something?"

"I find it a bit suspicious that _right_ when we get together, suddenly we're getting orders from the anonymous man," Xander said. "It's downright illusive or something."

"Really? 'The Illusive Man' sounds like a bad comic book villain," Harper said. "While I'm very doubtful as to the trustworthiness of him, _something_ grabbed me in the Grey. Outside of other Greywalkers, or a small number of supernatural creatures, that's just not possible."

"The message when I got here was helpful," Neville said. "Of course, it was written, not spoken. It told me where to get my omni-tool."

"I say we go along with it," Blackjack said, "and if mystery pony tries to backstab us, we blow him up!"

Everyone looked at her in silence for a moment. "Actually," Saeko said slowly, "I have to agree." As everyone turned their attention to her in turn, she flushed slightly. "What else do we have to go on? We might have maps, but none of us know this station. I doubt the maps show anything really important, like power plants or gravity or air supply. If it is a trap, hopefully between us we can either avoid it or spring it deliberately."

Adam nodded slowly. "It's a plan, then." The four with omni-tools pulled up their maps. "There's two elevators down to that ward. How do we get through without getting ambushed before we get ambushed? I don't have another airtruck full of explosive canisters."

Harper and Neville looked at each other and nodded. "No problem," he said. "For now, let's catch some sleep." Dividing up, they moved into the house-sized apartment, everyone but Adam picking a bed, couch, or in Blackjack's case, a pile of cushions. He merely sat at the table, running through different tactical options using the less-than-perfect tourist street map.


	14. Ominous Name

After six hours of sleep, Xander fell off the couch, managing to smack Blackjack painfully across the muzzle. Painful for Xander, that was, since she promptly whacked him over the head with one of her pistols before she had even fully awakened. From the chair in the dining room area, Adam watched them, eyes hidden behind his shades.

Still, joint cries of shock and pain were enough to get the other three rushing in from the bedrooms. "Now that everyone's awake," Adam rumbled from his seat, "who's ready to plan?"

Neville opened his mouth to answer, only for a loud growl from his stomach to beat him to the punch. "Does that planning include getting breakfast?" he asked. "Aside from those protein bars yesterday, I haven't eaten anything since I got here."

"Me neither," Harper chimed in. "I suppose that's an occasion where having a tourist map comes in handy?"

Saeko stretched, causing the temporary eyepatch-stitch holding her outfit together to pop loose, and for the second time, she flashed Xander before managing to grab it. Blushing furiously, she rushed back into one of the bedrooms, where they could hear her rattling through the closet. "Alright. We'll look for food along the way," Adam conceded. "It hadn't crossed my mind. I don't exactly have the same food requirements."

Harper sat down at the table next to him, pulling up the map on her omni-tool. "We're somewhere around here," she zoomed in on a designated "residential block 27" on the Presidium. Fiddling with it a little more, she suddenly had a blizzard of icons pop up all across the ring. "Damn this crazy hologram tech," she muttered.

By the time Saeko had exited the room, now dressed in a size-too-small t-shirt and shorts that left very little to Xander's and Blackjack's overactive imaginations, Harper had managed to narrow it down considerably. "I honestly don't know how much of the alien cuisine is safe to eat, so we'll just skip them completely. Between us and Kithoi ward, there's two different human restaurants." She turned to look at Blackjack, who was leaning her forehooves against the table to get a better look at the map, comparing it to whatever her PipBuck was showing her. "I'm not quite certain what you eat."

The unicorn smiled. "As far as real food goes, just about anything that's not other ponies. I like apples, carrots, and bacon the best."

"Mmmm, bacon," came the Homer Simpson impression from Xander, and everyone snickered a little bit. "So, our choices are a ramen shop," he flicked his eyes to Saeko for a moment, "or a chain restaurant called the Moonshine Café."

"I'm not picky, I vandalized a vending machine yesterday for some slightly stale pizza," the Japanese bombshell replied. "But the ramen shop looks less exposed."

Adam reached over, manipulating the map, zooming in and out. "We'll head for the ramen shop. It's another level up from us, so we'll have to find stairs or balcony hop. We pass the café on the way anyway, so we'll check it out if it's not filled with cyborg patrons. Anything that's packaged that we can grab, we should do so." He glanced around at everyone else. "I'm used to either single-agent tactics, or long-range tactical supervision, so if anyone has any bright ideas, feel free to spit them out."

Neville brought up a salient point. "How many weapons and shots do we all have? My wand works as long as I do, but the pistol I found I'm down to," he paused to unfold the weapon and glance at the readout, "six shots."

Harper held hers up. "This is some kind of older model. It's apparently unlimited ammo, but if it overheats, I can't do anything for a good ten seconds or so."

Blackjack, meanwhile, proceeded to empty her saddlebags of the "modern" weaponry she'd collected so far on the station, coming to a half dozen pistols, two shotguns, a submachine gun, and forty seven heat sinks. Everyone simply stared at the pile, then at her. "How do you fit all that in those tiny saddlebags? Are you hiding a TARDIS in there or something?" Xander asked.

"I don't even know what that means," she replied. "In the wasteland, you learn real quick to scavenge anything that looks worth the expense, and guns are almost _always_ worth it." She nudged the pile with a hoof. "I've been sticking to a pair of pistols, but I'm also good with a shotgun, though I haven't tried these ones. My sniper rifle from the Wasteland runs on ammo I don't think I can find here."

Adam nodded. "Mine too. I've got another twenty or so rounds with it, and it seems to work just fine on the cyborgs, but I'd rather stick with the stuff we can reload from local supplies." Saeko was already comparing shotguns, stopping to move the bayonet to the new one she wanted.

Once everyone was finished, and heat sinks distributed a little more evenly, they paused by the door. "I don't think we need to do the freaky ghost thing to leave, do we?" Saeko asked.

Adam chuckled, slapping the door control. "Nah, let them show up to where we used to be. They can't track us." They set out, jogging down the corridor, up a stairwell, and out onto the open-aired shopping area. Other than a couple of Keepers, quickly dispatched by Neville and Saeko, they saw none of their opponents, and reached the ramen shop set back into the wall of the Presidium.

The place was mostly in shambles, but the back stores were intact enough that everyone could munch on dry noodles as they walked, sprinkled with powdered salty flavoring. "This thing is supposed to be a delicacy?" Blackjack asked, reading an only faintly blood-spattered sign on the way out, surprised when everyone but Neville burst into laughter.

"Oh man, that's funny. I don't know how the owner pulled it off. This stuff is, like, almost literally the _cheapest_ thing you can buy at a grocery store," Xander mumbled, spraying tiny noodle crumbs as he talked. "He must have gotten a lot of aliens wanting to try out 'human delicacies.'"

Adam, the only one not eating, swept their path professionally as they continued down the shopping area, only to pause when a hologram flickered to life fifty feet away. His assault rifle came up, as did Neville's wand. "That thing again?" the wizard said, and flushed slightly as almost everyone glanced at him. "I tried to talk to one of those things when I first got here. It's damaged, or something, it's like three ghosts all stuck together, trying to talk at the same time."

Warily, they approached the holographic figure, which stood staring off into space blankly. "This thing must have some kind of sensor," Adam muttered, "so we don't have much time. But I want to see what I get out of it." He glanced around the group. "Xander, Blackjack, keep an eye out for cyborgs." Stepping straight in front of the figure, it suddenly locked three pairs of not-quite-overlapping eyes onto him. "What is your name?"

"I am," and the third part was garbled. He winced, trying to separate out the different voices. "You guys get anything?"

Harper nodded. "I was watching the mouth. The woman-in-armor is a Commander Shepard, I think."

Neville brightened up. "The computer in the embassy had a recording mentioning a Commander Shepard, that she wasn't on board the station."

"The pink one is Avina," Saeko chimed in. "It looks like the asari native to this place."

Adam nodded, and turned back to the hologram. "Is Shodan the AI controlling the cyborgs?"

At the mention of her name, the green-lined hologram grew in brightness, nearly eclipsing the other two parts. "Yes, I am SHODAN," she stuttered out, "and you inefficient organics will be **upgraded**."

"No thanks, I'm good," Blackjack muttered, not glancing at the dangerous-sounding computer program.

"How were you installed on the station?" Adam asked it. He briefly thought of trying his CASIE mod, but since holograms didn't have blood pressure or olfactory senses, it didn't seem worth the effort of booting it up.

"I awoke on this station in a terminal belonging to a Cerberus agent," the AI answered. "My terminal contained data relating to the Keepers and how to control them. I accessed Keepers to upload my programming into the central processing unit for the station. I accessed **all** Keepers. I began **upgrading** the local population."

Glancing around at his companions, Adam considered this. "What is your goal?" Harper chimed in.

"To complete the modification of the remaining 2% of organics aboard the station. To expand the boundaries of the universe. To **rule** the universe." They all considered this, before Blackjack's two pistols barked out shots.

Only the one cyborg had come into sight, but they all knew it was time to cut this short and get moving before they ended up boxed in. "Last question. Why do you need to expand the universe?" Adam asked, drawing and prepping his assault rifle. Neville's wand was already pointed at the projection plate, which hopefully would slow down the AI's ability to track them.

"Station sensors record the outer limit of the universe at 1.00127 light days. Ships attempting to flee my domain were destroyed by impact with the edge of the universe." Whatever the AI might have said next was cut off as Blackjack and Xander opened fire, joined quickly by Harper.

"Kill the bitch and let's run!" the unicorn shouted, backpedaling as she reloaded her pistols. "We're about to get overwhelmed!" Her EFS was showing her at least three dozen red bars converging on them from the direction of the apartment, and she really didn't want to get any more "**upgraded**" than she already was.

"Hexus!" Neville shouted, blowing the hologram into static and sparks, and they ran, Saeko taking the lead. When they pulled up even with the Kithoi elevator, and a surprisingly intact bridge, they were still being pursued, though with a greater lead than before. "Everyone ready to get down?" the wizard asked rhetorically, grabbing Saeko and Blackjack and Apparating down to the bottom.

Adam grabbed Harper, paused long enough for Xander to get a last shot off. "Hold on to my back!" he said, hefting Harper in his arms, feet braced on a broken section of balcony railing. As the other man leaped onto his back, they feel down towards the Presidium streets, a few shots from the cyborgs above them missing but close enough to feel.

Landing heavily, they prepped weapons again, racing across the bridge and to the dubious safety of the elevator. Conveniently, it was waiting and open for them, devoid of cyborgs, so they piled inside and Harper slapped the button. "Ok, at the bottom, Neville teleports people, and I greywalk people, and we get out safely before they turn us all into swiss cheese. Agreed?"

They trio'd up quickly, this time separating into men and women, and the open square at the bottom of the elevator full of cyborgs proved not exceptionally difficult to evade. To the surprise of the women, Neville's teleportation was remarkably easy to track, leaving a blazing (though short-lived) trail of golden light through the Grey. Regrouping inside a weapons store, they all quickly grabbed more heat sinks, and Adam and Blackjack flipped a coin to decide who would take the sniper rifle they found.

"Alright, this archive," Xander said. "It's what, ten miles from here?"

Adam did a quick conversion in his head. "Give or take, yes. If we didn't have to fight or avoid cyborgs the whole way, we could walk there in three hours."

"These wards don't seem very wide," Harper said doubtfully. "All they really have to do to cut us off is put a wall of cyborgs three deep across the width of it."

"I can go up above the atmosphere line, for brief periods anyway," Adam said. "You said something about getting around them using the grey, but that still limits how fast we can move." He turned to Neville. "Can you teleport through windows?"

"Sure, anywhere I can see," he replied, unwrapping another block of noodles. "I could probably walk myself through vacuum too. Just have to practice a bubble-head charm a few times."

"Can you put that charm on _us_?" Saeko asked, gesturing to Xander and Blackjack.

"Probably."

"Good," Adam said. "We get into the buildings that line the edge, go through them, and take a couple of detours through vacuum. The cyborgs don't seem to like it much. This artificial intelligence seems to be more like artificial obsessive, she didn't like it when I'd go busting through vacuum and throw open doors and windows. Drove the cyborgs nuts."

"They don't like Apparating much, either," Neville said. "Still, we're not going to make the whole distance in one day, I don't think. What's a destination halfway we can aim for?"

Harper pulled up the map again, consulting it. She nearly winced. "The Taralos Amphitheater is about eight kilometers from here. It spans the width of the ward." Everyone realized what that meant – wide, open ground, with no cover from cyborgs save whatever might have been put up by the resisting natives and not yet dismantled by the Keepers. "You sure you don't have another car tucked away under that coat?" she asked Adam sarcastically.

"Sadly, no." He sighed, hefting his assault rifle. "These buildings behind the amphitheater look tall enough to give us a good overwatch, though. We get into an apartment there, rest the night, maybe we can figure out how to get by without a couple thousand cyborgs upgrading us with lead-lined air conditioning."

"Cool, you know that nickname for bullet wounds too," Xander said, retiring his Widow for a pistol. "Now if we can just find me a nice axe, I'll be set.

"Why would you want a melee weapon with only one eye?" Neville asked curiously.

"Not that kind. I figured I'd kill the AI with the power of rock'n'roll," He responded blithely. Prepared for the tough slog ahead, they moved out into the building on the left, determined by coin toss. "This Shodan isn't going to know what hit her," Xander muttered confidently, taking a last glance at the crowd of cyborgs that still hadn't bothered to look away from the empty elevator.


	15. Preparations

Five miles doesn't seem like a great distance, when you measure it on a straight line. But, as either Blackjack or Saeko could have explained, when you consider that five miles includes going through, up, over, around, and in between various buildings, stores, and enemies, it rapidly becomes more than a mere five miles. When they finally reached the stand of apartment buildings they had been searching, all of them were sore, tired, and twitchy.

They scaled one building, making sure to throw open doors and push buttons on keypads to draw in the cyborgs, and while Xander and Adam rigged up several tripwire grenade traps, Harper and Saeko scouted the next building in line for a hiding place they could feel relatively secure. By the time everything was set up, with the six of them safe in their temporary refuge, their omni-tools showed they had been on the move for close to sixteen hours. "Are we splitting up watches, or what?" Xander asked around a yawn.

"We should," Adam said from the window, staring down at the half-lit amphitheater below. "Sooner or later, this AI is going to catch up to our ability to teleport between buildings. Plus, we're all out of grenades." He scanned the closest area below them, the hooded stage blocking little from his angle.

"Let's not get carried away with using grenades in an enclosed space," Blackjack cautioned. "I know from experience how fast _that_ can go wrong." The unicorn had already sagged to the floor onto a large shaggy rug, grateful to be off her hooves.

"How long are we going to rest up here? Then we can decide watches and sleep and prepare for our lightning dash tomorrow," Neville said, fighting back his own yawn.

"Let's aim for eight hours of sleep, then at most an hour to prepare," Adam said decisively. "There's not a lot of cyborgs down there, but there's enough I don't think a direct run through will succeed." He glanced around at everyone's tired faces. "Two hour watches? I'll take first and last – I don't need much sleep. Saeko, then Xander for the middle two."

"Then we can have bar peanuts and water for breakfast, yay," Xander muttered sarcastically. "I'd call dibs on the bathtub if there was one."

"You want to take a bath now?" Neville asked, confused, as the men shuffled towards one bedroom.

"Nah, haven't you even slept in a tub? A good blanket and pillow, and it's worlds more comfy than the floor. Right up until someone turns on the cold water to wake you up." Further banter was reduced to inaudibility as they exited the main room. The two women were silent as they did a matching shuffle into the other bedroom.

Adam stood by the window for several minutes, occasionally pacing to one side or the other as he studied the cyborg behavior. He jumped when Blackjack's quiet voice came from behind him. "Hoping to find a secret perfect pattern to sneak past them?"

He glanced over his shoulder at her glittering optics following him. "Well … something like that. My last few weeks in my world, I ended up infiltrating a couple of hideouts of gangs and business headquarters. I pretty much depended on figuring out their movements, taking out as many of them as quickly and quietly as possible, and shooting the ones I couldn't just punch out." He looked back out the window, letting the silence linger for several moments. "Mostly I'm wondering how much of the original person is trapped in them."

Unseen, she nodded in understanding. "You didn't choose to be a cyborg either, huh?" She sighed tiredly. "I guess I'm glad, even with the problems it's caused me. I don't want to be dead, even if being part machine makes me doubt my sanity sometimes."

"Huh," he grunted. "I've never doubted my sanity. Hated what happened to me, yeah. I spent the first six months punching out every mirror I looked in, hating the scars." He drifted into silence again, finally speaking just in time to cut off Blackjack's next words. "Hating the constant reminder that I hadn't been fast enough, strong enough, _good_ enough to stop them from killing so many good people."

"I know that feeling." Her words came out as little more as a whisper, and a sad quiet ruled the apartment for at least a minute. Their tableau was broken by a sudden snorting rumble from the men's bedroom, causing them both to look at the open doorway before looking at each other, both of them fighting the urge to crack up. "So who helps you stay sane?"

He shrugged, moving over to sit half-perched on the edge of the table. "Not sure what you mean. Mostly I've been buried in work, trying to track down the terrorists who attacked my company, uncovering a global conspiracy and then being asked to join them, that kind of thing."

"Hah, ancient conspiracies are old hat. At least the ponies involved in them are all dead." She paused to consider this. "_Mostly_ all dead, anyway. So, uh, you really don't have somepony to help you, um, stay sane?" She put a little more emphasis on the last two words.

Adam stared at her in bemused silence for a few seconds. "If you're insinuating what I think you are, then no, and I'm not likely to."

Blackjack was clearly aghast at this. "But, I mean, how do you hold on to being a pony, er, a _human_, if you don't have sex?"

He blinked at her several times, then stood up again, undid the belt on his pants, and dropped them to his ankles. She stared in shock at the unbroken synthetics, not seeing flesh until he pulled the shirt up to his sternum. "The doctors told me I'm only about ten percent organic parts now, mostly my brain, part of my spine, and some skin and underlying muscle on my face and upper chest." He continued the explanation as he put his clothes back in place. "My entire skeleton, almost all of my muscles, my eyes, heart, lungs, digestive system – all wholly synthetic."

"That's so _horrible_!" she whispered.

He knelt down, extending his arms, and as she leaned closer, gave her a sort of awkward hug. "It's really not that bad. I got to live longer, get justice for myself and all the other people who were hurt or killed, and see the face of the woman I loved one last time."

"But, you said that you were supposed to die," she protested. "What was the point, then?"

He sat back on the floor facing her. "In the end, I had four choices. First, side with my boss, let the companies who develop cybernetics control the future of human augmentation via the almighty dollar. Second, side with the conspiracy, controlling augmentation through religion and letting a tiny cabal control humanity. Third, side with a bitter old man, rejecting all augmentation to not leave behind the small portion of humanity who can't use cybernetics." He sighed heavily. "Or fourth, kill all three of them, leaving humanity free to make up its own mind."

She considered his points. "So you picked freedom?"

He nodded grimly. "One of our great statesmen said once, 'The tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots and traitors alike.' Or something like that, anyway." He shrugged, making his leather jacket squeak softly.

"That was very noble of you," Blackjack managed to force out through a yawn. "This pony should sleep now," she added, her head drooping down to rest on folded forehooves.

With a soft smile, Adam ran one hand gently over her mane before rising and moving to stand back by the window. Once there, he stared out at the cyborgs again for a long moment before turning to look at the doorway. "No comments?"

Saeko stepped silently out, the skirt on her new outfit barely swishing with her footsteps. "There is nothing to say. You are a good man, put in a bad situation." She glanced up at him with a smirk. "I know what that feels like."

He gave her a sardonic eyebrow raise worthy of Spock. "You know what it feels like to be a man?"

Her returning glare was split between him and the omni-tool on her wrist. "Stupid translation," she muttered. "Go ahead and sleep. I'm not going to until I'm done with my watch."

He hesitated for a moment before acquiescing. "Alright, if you're sure." Moving closer to the door, he removed his coat, rolling it into a pillow, and lying close enough to react if the cyborgs discovered them. The sound of snoring lulled him to sleep, coming in tandem from both Blackjack and one of the two men.


	16. Transportation

The night went by uneventfully, Adam woken by a yawning Xander who then shuffled back to bed. _Evidently, he's the snorer_, the cyborg thought. The apartment didn't have much in the way of food, but it did have a bewildering array of condiments, so for the last two hours of watch he spent it walking around the table making an increasingly detailed map of the amphitheater out of salt, pepper, hot sauce, and four packets with alien writing that came in different shades of blue-purple.

When everyone else got up, he was carefully placing small dabs of what looked like wasabi in various places. Harper was the first one to figure out what it was. "So, the empty box there is the stage, the salt and pepper trails are cyborg patrols, and the wasabi is Neville's teleporting spots?"

He nodded, impressed. "Yes. I haven't tried using my cloaking device yet, so I want to test it before we completely leave the building. You can still see the real world, so you can drop in and out as needed."

Blackjack put her hooves on a chair, craning her neck to take in the whole map. "Hey, that's kind of cool. What's the purple stuff?" She stuck out her tongue to one of the small smears, and promptly made a disgusted face. "Ugh, that tastes like rotten apples."

"The trails are my trying to figure out a way to walk through stealthed." He gestured at the wide array of them. "Hence why I have about three dozen different paths. It all depends on how well my cloak works against the cyborgs." He pointed at one side of the table, where a series of empty salt packets were laid out. "Those are the buildings on the other side. The three pepper ones are our rendezvous, depending on how thick the cyborgs are."

Xander, standing by the window, squinted out into the gloom. "There's no tall buildings for several blocks, so we'll be stuck in cramped quarters and open streets." He shrugged. "Then we've got another, what, seven miles? We can't do all that running and then storm those archives on top of it."

Saeko stepped up next to him, pointing at where a dark shape rose higher than some of the buildings. "What's that building there?"

Everyone consulted their maps quickly, moving over to the windows to stare outside. "According to my map," Harper said slowly, "that's the Larathos Institution. Some kind of inter-species college, I think." She tried to pull up more information. "And it doesn't have a giant dark building in the middle of it."

"Then what is it?" Neville asked. "One of those ships the AI said were destroyed?"

"OK then," Adam said as everyone exchanged glances, "new destination – head for that, at least close enough to see what it is and how intact it is. If it's a ship, it might have shuttles or fighters or something." Everyone nodded, Blackjack looking particularly enthused. "So, back to the original cross-the-amphitheater plan. Neville, how many times can you teleport in a row?"

He led the wizard back to the table, showing him the dots. "This is too complicated. I can teleport anywhere within line of sight. I could probably get all the way over in one jump, if I aimed for the roof or outside of a building."

"Alright then. I just need to test my cloak against these cyborgs." He turned towards the door.

"Why?" Saeko asked, and he paused to look back at her. "Neville can take two. Harper can take two. Why try and sneak across by yourself?"

"Our mystery voice mentioned the Archives. If he's telling the truth, and it's not a trap, then there will be more cyborgs in that building than there are in the whole amphitheater down there. Too many for us to run in, guns blazing, and hope to survive let alone destroy the place." He rapped on the synthetics of his abdomen. "All of my upgrades were pretty much designed for a stealthy infiltrator. I want to know now whether I can do that effectively."

"You mean split up," Xander said, and the cyborg nodded. "I'm guessing you don't watch horror movies. Splitting up is always a bad idea."

"We might not have a choice," Blackjack said. "I've also got a stealth cloak, kind of, but it's very limited use. Even with that Gray thing, we can't all just ghost through together. And we might have to do several things at once." She shrugged her own shoulders helplessly. "He's got a point."

"Let him test it," Neville said. "I'll wait up here, with Blackjack. Harper can take Saeko and Xander and start crossing the open field. If he can't evade them, then I can Apparate all three of us to the other side." He glanced around at his companions. "We can't sit up here all day. Every minute we waste is another cyborg coming after us."

"So. If you hear gunfire, then it didn't work," Adam said, and opened the door. A shimmer rolled over his body, turning him transparent, and with barely a distortion and almost no noise, he was gone. Harper reached out hands to the other two, and they rippled and faded out of existence as they started walking downhill through the floor towards the rows of seats below.

Neville waited nervously with Blackjack, whose twin pistols were out and hovering above her head protectively, aimed towards the door. He kept checking his omni-tool nervously, each twitch of his finger feeling a year apart but reading only seconds. Finally, ten minutes had passed, and he reached out his non-wand hand to brush the unicorn's mane. "It must have worked. Time to go." She dropped the guns back into her saddlebags, and he tangled his fist into her mane.

They popped out of existence on the strip of grass just above the last row of seats, and a dozen cyborgs turned to orient on them, but before any shots could be fired, they blinked again and were on the roof of one of the buildings. Moving quietly, they snuck back up to the edge, watching the field. The cyborgs below were agitated, of course, but they hadn't yet figured out how to trace teleportation. Neville's concentration was shattered when Blackjack suddenly nudged him with a hoof, pointing off to one side.

A cyborg lay on the ground, twitching. Nearby ones were already moving towards it, and as they watched, a slight distortion rippled through the air next to it, and that cyborg crumpled to the ground lacking a head and one arm. The trail of destruction could be traced back to at least the stage, but it seemed headed for one of the non-meetup buildings.

Several more tense minutes went by, and the near-silence was suddenly roused with heavy breathing. They both whirled around, weapons ready, to find their three friends, crouched on the roof, Harper covered in sweat and panting harshly. Saeko grinned, raising her omni-tool in salute, and helped the greywalker lie down on the metal surface.

"That was you?" Neville whispered, gesturing over his shoulder at the path of crippled and destroyed cyborgs. Saeko nodded. "Nice work."

Xander and Blackjack both pulled out their sniper rifles, moving to the opposite side of the roof, scanning the nearby avenues and buildings. They stayed silent, merely spotting their targets for the moment, gauging the distances involved and lining up shots. Then Adam appeared at the third of the marked buildings, on the side away from the amphitheater.

Unfortunately, it was also in plain view of four cyborgs. One of them was already crumpling, thanks to his arm blade, but the other three turned weapons in his direction. One fell to a headshot from Blackjack, a second had her torso explode thanks to Xander's Widow, and the third proceeded to open fire as Adam dove desperately to the side, trying to draw his own weapon. It paused, mid-fire, as Neville pointed his wand at it, just long enough for Adam to close the distance, jab his pistol in the still-organic eye socket and pull the trigger.

"We need to move, _now_," Saeko said, her shotgun out to blow away a cyborg directly below them in the street. "They're going to swarm this building." Neville got one of Harper's arms over his shoulder, blinking two buildings down and blowing apart a Keeper as it emerged up through a trapdoor.

The other three leaped off the short building, dashing through the streets to rejoin Adam. The next hour was spent alternating between mad sprints full of gunfire, magic beams, and explosions, and quietly creeping from one place to another. Harper recovered enough to help with the shooting, though by the time they reached the edge of the campus, she looked ready to sleep for a week.

The dark shape, now better visible from closer, was a spaceship of some kind. The shape was like an arrowhead, and it sat sunk into the ground almost vertically. The writing on the side was alien, and a barely visible turian corpse could be seen dangling from the airlock. "So it is a ship," Neville said.

"I'm going to guess it's not flyable, though," Blackjack drawled.

"No, but it might have shuttles or aircars or something. If not, we'll check the parking lot over that way," he gestured towards the opposite end of campus. "Neville, do you think you can teleport me up to stand on that stabilizer thing near the back of the ship?"

Nodding, the wizard took his arm, and they vanished, appearing tiny compared to the bulk of the ship stretching two hundred meters above their heads. They conferred for a moment, then vanished again. "I hope they know what they're doing," Harper said softly. Without needing to talk, all of them moved back to back, weapons out and ready.

Five minutes later, as they crouched there in the dark, a sudden whining arose, turning quickly into a soft rumble, and from the back of the ship rose up a blocky shape that reminded Xander of something built from Lego bricks. It swooped down near them, and the door popped open to reveal Neville holding onto the grips of what looked like a portable cannon. "Get in!" he said, and they sprinted across the hundred meters, piling inside before the inevitable cyborg response could come.

Adam pulled the shuttle high up above the ward, finally parking it near the center of the arms and emerging from the pilot chamber. "Other than all the instructions being in turian, it's not too bad," he said. "It has a couple of machine guns fixed to fire front. Other than that," he gestured to the cannon Xander was drooling over, "no weaponry, no grenades, nothing."

"Still, it's better than we had before," Harper said. "So now what's the plan?"

"We do a couple of fly-bys, scout the place, retreat high enough to avoid being shot at." As if to mock him, the hull of the shuttle rang with a soft patter of small-arms fire. "What the fuck. God damn this AI!" he growled, stalking back into the pilot seat and goosing the thrusters. "OK, who's got a plan B?" he called out through the open door.

"Oh, oh, I do!" Blackjack said, sitting on her haunches and actually waving a hoof in the air. "We take the shuttle, use it to punch a hole in the roof, and then fly it inside the building and use it to shoot up all the cyborgs!" Everyone but Adam, busy jinking the shuttle around unpredictably, turned to stare at her disbelievingly. "What? This thing is armored, and it's got heavier weapons, and if we have to we just run those ponies over!"

"I like her style," Saeko said dryly, cracking a small smile. "As long as we can still bail out if they start firing rockets at us or whatever."

"Fine, plan B is officially crash into the building." Adam shook his head before switching to a deliberately bored voice. "Please make sure all tray tables and seat backs are in the full upright and locked position. The captain has turned on the no smoking and no screaming signs. We will be landing at Council Archives in," the shuttle was suddenly turned into a sharp dive, engine screaming at full power as the guns started firing, "about ten seconds."

His sensors had already picked out an apparently damaged spot on the roof, which was just below the atmosphere line, and the gunfire weakened it enough it was already starting to collapse when Adam hit the reverse thrusters, slamming the shuttle through the roof in a blaze of metal fragments and suddenly melted plastic. The room they emerged in was covered in corpses, stacked four or five high, that the shuttle bounced off of with a grim squelching sound.

"Fuck me," Xander muttered under his breath.

"Just this room must have a thousand bodies," Neville said, staring out the opposite viewport. "Now we attack?" he asked grimly.

Adam oriented the shuttle's nose on the door into the room, squeezing the trigger and watching it dent, then perforate, under the hail of bullets. "Now we _kill_."


End file.
